Lighting Dark Places : Essays on Kate Grenville [1 ed.] 9789042032866, 9789042032859

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Lighting Dark Places

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

131 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Lighting Dark Places Essays on Kate Grenville

Edited by

Sue Kossew

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover image: Donald Friend (Australia 1915–89; lived in Nigeria 1938–40, Sri Lanka 1957–61, Indonesia 1968–79), The Clarence from Yugilbar (1963; oil on canvas, 61.4 x 45.8 cm) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne The Joseph Brown Collection Presented through the NGV Foundation by Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2004 Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3285-9 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3286-6 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

 It does not follow that because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively no shape at all or an infinity of shapes. It does not follow that because interpretation plays a necessarily large part in establishing the facts of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, one interpretation is as good as another, and the facts of history are in principle not amenable to objective interpretation. — E.H. Carr, What is History? (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 26–27. The novel arose from the shortcomings of history. It assumes that writer and reader possess a divinatory or historical sense and pleasure. It has no specific aim and is absolutely unique. History is necessarily always incomplete. (Der Roman ist aus Mangel der Geschichte entstanden. Er setzt für den Dichter und Leser divinatorischen, oder historischen Sinn und Lust voraus. Er bezieht sich auf keinen Zweck und ist absolut eigentümlich. Die Geschichte muß immer unvollständig bleiben.) — Novalis, “Fragmenten und Studien” (1799–1800), in Novalis, Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Paul Kluckhohn & Richard Samuel with Hans–Joachim Mähl & Gerhard Schulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960–88), vol. 3: 668. Although historians and writers of fiction may be interested in different kinds of events both the forms of their respective discourses and their aims in writing are often the same. In addition, in my view, the techniques or strategies that they use in the composition of their discourses can be shown to be substantially the same, however different they may appear on a purely surface, or dictional, level. — Hayden White, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” in White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1978): 121. ... that history is not reality; that history is a kind of discourse; that a novel is a kind of discourse, too, but a different kind of discourse; that, inevitably, in our culture, history will, with varying degrees of forcefulness, try to claim primacy, claim to be a master-form of discourse, just as, inevitably, people like myself will defend themselves by saying that history is nothing but a certain kind of story that people agree to tell each other. — J.M. Coetzee, “The Novel Today,” Upstream 6.1 (Summer 1988): 3.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction Reading Feminism in Kate Grenville’s Fiction — SUSAN SHERIDAN

ix xi

1

Kate Grenville as Public Intellectual — BRIGID ROONEY

17

Author! Author! The Two Faces of Kate Grenville — ELIZABETH MCMAHON

39

Madness and Power: Lilian’s Story and the Decolonized Body — BILL ASHCROFT

55

“Africa and Australia” Revisited: Reading Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History — KWAKU LARBI KORANG

73

“Mobility is the Key”: Bodies, Boundaries, and Movement in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story — RUTH BARCAN

93

Homeless and Foreign: The Heroines of Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse — KATE LIVETT

119

“Impossible Speech” and the Burden of Translation: Lilian’s Story from Page to Screen — ALICE HEALY

135

Constructions of Nation and Gender in The Idea of Perfection — SUE KOSSEW

153

Poison in the Flour: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River — ELEANOR COLLINS

167

History, Fiction and The Secret River — SARAH PINTO

179

Learning from Each Other: Language, Authority, and Authenticity in Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant — LYNETTE RUSSELL

199

Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

211 251 255

Acknowledgements

Previously published pieces include: Ruth Barcan, “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’: Bodies, Boundaries and Movement in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 29.2 (April 1998): 31–55; Eleanor Collins, “Poison in the Flour,” Meanjin 65.1 (March 2006): 38–47; Alice Healy, “ ‘ Impossible Speech’ and the Burden of Translation: Lilian’s Story from Page to Screen,” J A S A L 5 (2006): 163–78; and Kwaku Larbi Korang, “ ‘ Africa and Australia’ Revisited: Reading Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History,” Antipodes 17.1 (2003): 5–12.

Thanks to the original publishers for permission to reproduce: The Board of Governors, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta and Myrna Sentes (Editor) at A R I E L ; Sophie Cunningham, editor of Meanjin; Philip Mead (University of Tasmania) and Barbara Milech (Curtin), editors of J A S A L 5 (2006); and Nicholas Birns, editor of Antipodes. Some of the chapter on The Idea of Perfection was first published in Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction (London & New York: Routledge, 2003). Thanks also to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, for permission to use Donald Friend’s painting The Clarence from Yugilbar on the cover. The image is reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of the late Donald Friend. Laura Joseph is to be thanked for her work as Research Assistant and especially for compiling and updating the Bibliography, as is Anna MacDonald, for her invaluable help in preparing the final manuscript. Thanks to our Cross /Cultures co-editor and technical editor, Gordon Collier, for his work on the volume, including his suggestions for the Bibliography and the epigraphs. I should like to acknowledge the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies and the Faculty of Arts at Monash University for kind support with publication and research assistance. 

Introduction

K

A T E G R E N V I L L E H A S B E C O M E one of Australia’s most successful contemporary writers, winning both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, an indication of her international reputation. She has to date published eight novels and four works of non-fiction, with another novel, the third in her trilogy of novels set in Australia’s settler past, in the pipeline. Her writing is distinctive for its sharp-edged wit, its fictional engagement with often real-life characters and events, and its metaphoric forcefulness. As Grenville has suggested on a number of occasions, empathy is a keystone of her oeuvre: her approach seems always driven by a desire to understand what she herself may have done or thought, had she been one of her chosen characters. This empathetic understanding enables her and her readers to think through her characters and to walk in their shoes and, as they are often social misfits or alternative thinkers, to face their dilemmas of belonging or rejection. Her clear-eyed view of Australian society, past and present, with its pressure to conform, particularly to gender stereotypes, creates the context for the dilemmas faced by these individuals. For Grenville, the role of fiction is to take the reader out of his/ her comfort zone and into a new, often uncomfortable space that can be uncertain, dangerous, interesting, and new as a way of challenging set ideas and beliefs. She strongly believes that art, including the art of the writer, has the ability to change people’s thinking and that this is one of its sources of power. In a talk given in Melbourne about writers in a time of change, she suggested that artists have access to a type of thinking akin to intuition or inspiration that is beyond the logical while at the same time trying to rescue language from “corruption.” In the same talk, she expressed what could be seen as her writerly credo: “Let us write with passion, deeply into the mysterious folds of

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the human interior. Let us write as if it matters, because it does.”1 Yet she resists the idea that art can or should be polemical: rather, fiction for her is a way of working through “puzzles about human behaviour” that draws readers in to a similar journey towards understanding. In her words, again from the keynote address at the Festival of Ideas: “Writers have ways of going into the darkest places, taking readers with them and coming out safely.” In any review of Grenville’s body of work, one of the themes that consistently appears is her challenging of what she has termed the mythologizing of the “heroic parched outback,” subverting the version of Australian history that has privileged the type of the ‘Aussie battler’ in its various guises. Her revision of this male-dominated history is a strongly feminist one, and one that seeks to reinsert marginalized figures into the story of the nation. She was born Kate Gee in Sydney, Australia in 1950, and completed a B A Honours degree at Sydney University, majoring in English literature, in 1972. After a stint in Europe in the 1970s, she studied in the U S A , undertaking a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Colorado in 1980. During this time, she wrote a number of short stories later published as Bearded Ladies (1984) and a novel that was published as Dreamhouse (1986). In 1983, she returned to Sydney, where she completed her novel Lilian’s Story, which won her national attention in the form of the 1984 Australian / Vogel National Literary Award for the best as yet unpublished novel by a writer under the age of thirty-five. Lilian’s Story was published in 1985 and received acclaim from no less than Australia’s Nobel Prize-winner for Literature, Patrick White, who described it as transforming “an Australian myth into a dazzling fiction of universal appeal.”2 Her next novel, Joan Makes History (1988), was commissioned by the Australian Government as part of the Australian Bicentenary. Responding to this national moment of commemoration and self-reflection, Grenville’s novel re-stages key episodes in Australian history, rewriting them from a woman’s viewpoint. This alternative version focuses on the women previously in the shadows rather than the men who have ‘made’ history. This strongly feminist thematic concern with the lives of women is clearly evoked in Lilian’s Story, a narrative loosely based on the story of Bea Miles, 1

Kate Grenville, “Kate Grenville: Writers in a Time of Change,” keynote address at the Festival of Ideas, University of Melbourne (May 2009), http://www.themonthly .com.au/kate-grenville-writers-time-change-part-2-1884 2 Quoted in Jane Gleeson–White, Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works (Crows Nest, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2007): 313.

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who was a notoriously eccentric character who lived in Sydney from the 1930s to 1970s. In addition to being a transgressive and irrepressible character, Lilian seems also to represent the ‘larrikin’ aspect of Australian identity. At the same time, the novel can be read as a postcolonial representation of the colonial relationship between Australia and England. Dark Places (titled Albion’s Story in the U S A ), the sequel to Lilian’s Story, a novel that is written from the perspective of Albion, Lilian’s authoritarian and abusive father, is its mirror image, representing the other side of the story. The two novels should be read together, each presenting a point of view that illuminates the ways in which gender roles can polarize and make victims of both men and women. Grenville’s other novel concerned with Australian identity, The Idea of Perfection (1999), similarly engages with gender and national stereotypes and the pressure to conform to these. Set in the fictional town of Karakarook, this novel is a wry satire of established myths about the Australian ‘bush’ and its discourses of nationalism that lay down strict rules for how to be Australian. Her two main characters in this novel, Harley Savage and Douglas Cheeseman, fail to conform to these ideas of perfection and are therefore regarded as misfits. Grenville employs metaphors of bridge-building and quilting to represent how these two characters are gradually drawn to each other. The main themes of her work, including the recuperation of women’s stories, a redefinition of the heroic and of national identity, and the voicing of silences about the past, converge in a strong engagement with the relationship between fiction and history. This is particularly apparent in The Secret River (2005), a novel in which her search for her own family history coincided with the growing national sense of the need to rethink the relationship between settler and Indigenous culture in today’s Australia. For, as Grenville acknowledges in her writing memoir, Searching for the Secret River, which illuminates the process of writing her novel, “when you were a white Australian, investigating your history could lead you into some murky territory.”3 In the same commentary on the novel, she suggests that a moment in which her thinking shifted occurred during her participation in the “Sorry Day” March in May 2000, where the idea of reconciliation was embodied in a march across Sydney Harbour Bridge. For Grenville, the march was simply a “strolling” towards reconciliation, an easy alternative: what she also had to do was to “cross the hard way, through the deep water of our history” (13). Thus, The 3

Kate Grenville, Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006): 20. Further page references are in the main text.

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Secret River explores ideas of colonial contact, both violent and conciliatory, in the early years of settlement along the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales; it is a narrative that closely mirrors the story of Grenville’s own convict ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, after whom the place Wiseman’s Ferry outside Sydney is named. This novel gave rise to a heated debate in (mostly) academic circles concerning the novelist’s ‘rights’ over history, fuelled mainly by historians who expressed disquiet over the boundary lines between fiction and history. Grenville, however, has been at pains to point out that she has never claimed to be writing history but, rather, that, as a novelist, she uses historical sources by coming to the past “in a different way, which is the way of empathizing and imaginative understanding of those difficult events.” 4 Her fictional account of historical events, marking its fictional construction by its changing of the names of real-life people, attempts not to rewrite history but to “acknowledge the complex relationship […] between the world of fiction and the world inhabited by living people.”5 Another historical fiction, The Lieutenant, was published in 2008 and is similarly concerned with early colonial history in Australia, focused on settler/ Indigenous relations. This novel is based once more on a real historical event – the relationship that developed in the first years of settlement in Sydney between a lieutenant in the First Fleet and a young Aboriginal girl named Patyegarang. Inspired, during her research for The Secret River, by her reading of the notebooks of William Dawes, in which he recorded his conversations with the young girl and recorded the Gadigal language that she spoke, Grenville renames her characters Daniel Rooke and Tagaran. By dramatizing the contexts for Dawes’s notebooks, Grenville re-imagines their friendship and the effect it had on Dawes and the decisions he had to make. While describing this novel as the companion-piece to The Secret River, “the yang to The Secret River’s yin,”6 Grenville is now writing a third novel to complete a trilogy set in Australia’s colonial past. Grenville is particular about avoiding the term ‘historical novels’ for these texts, preferring to describe them as 4

Ramona Koval, “Books and Writing with Ramona Koval,” A B C Radio National (17 July 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm. Cited also in Kate Grenville, “The Question of History: Response,” Quarterly Essay 25 (2007): 70. 5 Grenville, “The Question of History,” 68. 6 Catherine Keenan, “A Historical Balancing Act,” The Age (20 September 2008), A2: 24.

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literary novels that happen to be set in the past. She was careful to append a note to The Lieutenant in which she states that her work of fiction was “inspired by recorded events” but that it should not “be mistaken for history.” Whether because the events represented in this novel were considered less problematic than those in The Secret River or whether the debate has simply run out of steam, The Lieutenant has not attracted the controversy surrounding The Secret River. Grenville has written extensively about her own writing method, first in a book she co-edited with her fellow writer, Sue Woolfe, entitled Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written (1993). Here she writes about the composition of Lilian’s Story as collecting and putting together fragments of writing that were written non-sequentially and as vignettes. References have already been made to her “writing memoir” Searching for the Secret River (2006), which charts the process of writing and researching The Secret River. While not written as a text on “how to write a novel” (like her 1990 publication The Writing Book: A Workbook for Fiction Writers and 2002 book Writing from Start to Finish: A Six-Step Guide), this is more of a writer’s diary, in which she retraces the creative journey leading up to her novel, written as the exegesis component of her doctorate in Creative Arts at the Sydney University of Technology. E L I Z A B E T H M C M A H O N ’s piece “Author! Author! The Two Faces of Kate Grenville,” commissioned for this volume, addresses this important and underrated aspect of Grenville’s books written on the craft of writing and how these locate her own writing practice both within the gendered and embodied everyday world (as a woman, mother, daughter) and within the growing academic field of creative writing. McMahon seeks to account for the “alignment” and “flux” between Grenville’s authorial roles, as author of books on writing and as author of novels. Grenville has won numerous prizes for her writing, including the overall and regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction (N S W Premier’s Literary Award) for The Secret River, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006; and the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in 2001 for The Idea of Perfection. Her novels have been translated into numerous languages and both Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse (as Traps) have been adapted as films. A film version of The Secret River is currently in pre-production. There are a number of essays in this collection on the novel that sealed Grenville’s early reputation as an important Australian writer, Lilian’s Story. B I L L A S H C R O F T has provided a new reading of Lilian’s Story that empha-

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sizes the resistant power of narrative itself, a reading that uses postcolonial theory to tease out the ways in which Lilian’s feminist appropriation of power (most dramatically from her father, Albion, as representative of patriarchal Darwinian and imperial discourses and practices) enables her to ‘find’ both her body and her voice. In this way, Lilian writes herself into the history and mythmaking of the Australian nation. Thus, as Ashcroft demonstrates, the novel is not so much the story of one woman (loosely based on the real-life Bea Miles) as a “subtle story of cultural transformation,” a story of a nation finding its own individual identity and voice. It is, of course, as Ashcroft points out, no mere coincidence that (much like Salman Rushdie’s main character Saleem in Midnight’s Children, who was born at the moment that India became independent) Lilian is born in the year of Australia’s Federation, 1901. R U T H B A R C A N takes a phrase from the novel, spoken by Lilian, “mobility is the key,” and uses it to construct an elegant argument for a spatial reading of the text in the context of feminist criticism. In so doing, she analyzes the novel’s exploration of the limitations imposed by social conditioning on the female body, and charts Lilian’s increasing ability to escape this “abjection” projected upon her. The trope of the border provides a useful and productive way of discussing Lilian’s trespassing across boundaries and Grenville’s blurring of binaries such as inside and outside through her narrational “double perspective,” using both first- and third-person focalization through Lilian. The “freedom of the city” that Lilian attains once she has escaped the prisons of her home, university, and the asylum, a freedom of movement that is characterized by her hijacking of taxis (an act that is, of course, closely associated with the real-life Bea Miles), is, like her fatness, a sign of defiance, an overrunning of restrictive boundaries, both physical and psychological, imposed upon her. A L I C E H E A L Y ’s contribution provides a rare account of the ‘translation’ of Lilian’s Story from page to screen in a discussion of both the novel and the film, directed by Jerzy Domaradzki, with a screenplay by Steve Wright, made in 1995. In a thought-provoking discussion of “cultural translation,” she uses the notion of translation in several nuanced ways: the migrant director’s “double vision,” in which Sydney is seen through “new eyes”; the translation from written text to visual screen; and Lilian’s transformative use of Shakespeare’s texts. All three of these essays ‘speak to’ each other and, as such, provide a useful account of three different but linked readings. K A T E L I V E T T ’s piece on

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Grenville’s heroines in Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse is a further example of the potential for a rich theoretical engagement with Grenville’s texts, in its application of notions of homelessness and foreignness with regard to the fraught subjectivities of the characters Lilian and Louise. Building on Ruth Barcan’s analysis of Lilian, Livett argues that what could be seen as Lilian’s and Louise’s abject pathologization, when carefully considered, is presented by Grenville also as a space of agency and resistance. B R I G I D R O O N E Y ’s essay on Grenville as a public intellectual is a timely one. Grenville has, in the past two years, become an international literary performer, featured in such influential media as the B B C , on Australian radio and television, and on the global literary lecture circuit (the B B C ’s World Book Club, for example). This is largely the result of the huge success of The Secret River, both nationally and internationally. Rooney uses the impact of this novel and the debate that surrounded it as a starting point to argue for the increasing importance of Grenville’s public interventions in her “public engagement with nation” and traces the trajectory by which this public profile has emerged in the course of Grenville’s literary career, from her early novels right through to the most recently published The Lieutenant. Similarly, S U S A N S H E R I D A N ’s wide-ranging analysis of Grenville’s fiction in the context of its feminism, published here for the first time, links an intellectual framework of ideas to the very shape and structure of her narratives. She traces through Grenville’s work the development of her feminist ideas from early anger at prejudice and injustice, through ‘difference feminism’ to a postfeminist engagement with anticolonialism and antiracism. This essay provides a very useful review of Grenville’s texts in the light of cultural and literary feminist movements. The link between nation and gender is explored, too, in my own essay on The Idea of Perfection, a novel that, despite being awarded the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, has generated little critical attention. I argue that Grenville is both responding to and resisting stereotypical gendered notions of Australianness (both cultural and literary) in her representation of two ‘misfits’, neither of whom slots neatly into the pigeonholed version of ‘Australian man’ or ‘Australian woman’ that is prevalent in the ‘literature of the Bush’. Similarly, for the African academic K W A K U L A R B I K O R A N G , it is Grenville’s representational practices that are of particular interest. Focusing on a reading of Joan Makes History in the light of a comparative essay by Bill Ashcroft that suggests a shared “post-colonial dynamic” between Africa and

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Australia,7 Korang reads the novel ‘out of Africa’ as a “self encountering an other […] in a cross-referential dialectic.” In doing so, he produces a reading of Grenville’s novel attuned to its feminist dismantling of an Australian history that privileges “the articulation of dominant white, Anglo-Celtic, male interests.” Yet, he points out, in order to provide a simultaneously alternative and inclusive history, Grenville-as-Joan takes on, in addition to the other roles she inhabits in the novel, the historical personae of two Aboriginal women, a totalizing move that Korang suggests could be “problematically premature” in a still postcolonizing Australia by flattening out differences between Indigenous and settler histories. Ultimately, though, Korang concludes, the novel succeeds in carving out a space for the “reconstitution of Australian women’s subjectivity” in a novel that, while providing insights that are “vitally postcolonial,” also, by virtue of its realism, is still working through existing forms of national consciousness. It is noteworthy that the postcolonial theorist Graham Huggan has similarly discussed Grenville’s engagement with Aboriginal history in the novel, concluding, in much the same way, that Grenville’s playful restaging of the past is less concerned with reinstating these excluded or marginalized groups than with showing “their subsumption within dominant male versions of history in which they are consigned to a restricted number of pre-designated roles.”8 It is Grenville’s ironic re-enactment of the nation’s past that undermines history’s power to control representation. Issues of narration and realism, particularly in relation to reimagining the past, have also been of vital interest in critical discussions of The Secret River. This volume includes two essays on this important novel, one previously published and one newly commissioned. The novel, as already suggested, has prompted a number of critical debates, not just about the uses of the past in fictional accounts but also about questions of reading that the novel raises, particularly through its narrative focalization. E L E A N O R C O L L I N S ’s essay, “Poison in the Flour: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,” was originally published as a review of the book and engages specifically with the discomforting reading experience produced by reading of one’s nation’s troubled past. Collins finds that any ethical discomfort that, for her, emerges as a result of the third-person realist narration is diminished by reading the novel through the 7

Bill Ashcroft, “Africa and Australia: The Post-Colonial Connection,” Research in African Literatures 25.3 (1994): 161–170. 8 Graham Huggan, Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2007): 68.

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lens of ‘the tragic’. This, she argues, enables a reading of Thornhill as a tragically flawed character and provides a fitting genre for Grenville’s empathetic imagination. S A R A H P I N T O , as an historian, is similarly concerned with the historical novel’s imaginative re-creation of historical moments and figures. She considers Grenville’s fascination with archival research and with the processes of historical investigation in the context of the seemingly unceasing public debates about The Secret River as a way of explaining why historians felt the need to respond to the novel. At stake, she suggests, were questions about the ways in which history is told and, in the process, how accounts of history may be differentiated from historical fiction. Indeed, it is the very notion of empathy that some historians regarded as ‘unhistorical’. Pinto argues that the rivalry between history and fiction, and history’s claim to have access to a verifiable past, have tended to shut down what could and should be a productive exchange between the two. Historical fiction can have both analytical and interpretative power that offers insights to historians as writers, thereby contributing to current historical practices that favour a more experimental form of writing history. The Secret River is notable, too, for its bringing to light the ‘hidden history’ of Aboriginal dispossession. The Indigenous writer and academic Larissa Behrendt, in a wide-ranging article on traditional Aboriginal values and contemporary social policy, begins by praising Grenville for her ability to uncover the “act of stealing” that accompanied land acquisition in Australia. She notes Grenville’s empathetic imaging in The Secret River, citing the image in the novel of the carved fish stone beneath Thornhill’s house as a symbol of the ways in which history has sometimes “been deliberately suppressed to give the impression of more noble beginnings.”9 Behrendt believes that such an acknowledgement of Australia’s hidden past, the uncovering of these layers of history and the exposure of these often-violent foundations of the colony, can lead to a more equal reciprocity and a “future for all Australians.”10 L Y N E T T E R U S S E L L , in her essay published for the first time in this volume, agrees with Behrendt’s assessment that Grenville’s novels can be regarded as part of a process of wider reconciliation. Russell’s own lack of Aboriginal language and attempts to learn it have led her to identify strongly 9

Larissa Behrendt, “What Lies Beneath,” Meanjin 65.1 (2006): 4. Behrendt, “What Lies Beneath,” 12.

10

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with the characters in The Lieutenant and, in her essay on the novel, she argues for a reading that explores the role of language in mediating the friendship between Rooke and Tagaran as an allegory of the relationship between black and white Australia. For, she suggests, the stories from the past which novelists like Grenville have uncovered that deal with both positive and negative engagements between settler and Indigenous peoples are “stories that belong to both” groups, the telling and retelling of which “ought to be seen as an exercise in reconciliation.” I believe that this collection of new and previously published essays on Grenville’s writing, which includes an extensive bibliography that is up-todate at the time of publication, will provide the reading public, both academic and general, with a useful reference work that will help to make available a range of responses and critical approaches. The variety of such reactions is testament to the richness of Grenville’s writings and to her contribution to the Australian literary scene both nationally and internationally. It is indeed timely that such a volume should be published, given the increasing reach of Grenville’s literary reputation and the interest in her work both at home and abroad. Grenville’s own writerly credo expresses eloquently both her approach to writing and the expectations she has of her readers: I’d like the reader to be as powerfully drawn along, as I was in writing – to always be in the position of wondering why people are doing what they’re doing, and what’s going to become of them. As a writer, those questions are what keeps me going – I have to write the book to find out what happens and why. Yes, I do want to entertain – to try to seize the reader with the same passion I felt, and whirl them along as I was whirled, following these people into all their troubles and all their joys.11

It is this empathetic energy and imagination, as well as a strongly metaphoric but accessible writing style, that have attracted readers to Grenville’s work. She has created memorable fictional characters, often ‘outsiders’ who are fiercely individualistic and who maintain their integrity whatever the consequences, or those who are placed in moral dilemmas that test their mettle or that bring out an inherent moral ambivalence. Above all, Grenville’s novels are ‘good reads’ that venture into the dark places of humanity and society, 11

“Kate Grenville Interviewed by Mark Rubbo,” Readings: Melbourne (2 October

2008), http://www.readings.com.au/interview/kate-grenville1

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past and present, in order to shed light on human behaviour and relationships. In doing so, they function, too, as allegories of the nation. SUE KOSSEW

WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill. “Africa and Australia: The Post-Colonial Connection,” Research in African Literatures 25.3 (1994): 161–70. Behrendt, Larissa. “What Lies Beneath,” Meanjin 65.1 (2006): 4–12. Gleeson–White, Jane. Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and their Celebrated Work (Crows Nest, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2007). Grenville, Kate. “Kate Grenville: Writers in a Time of Change,” keynote address at the Festival of Ideas, University of Melbourne (May 2009), http://www.themonthly .com.au/kate-grenville-writers-time-change-part-2-1884 (accessed 25 September 2010). ——. “The Question of History: Response,” Quarterly Essay 25 (February 2007): 66– 72. ——. Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006). ——, with Catherine Keenan. “The Interview,” Sydney Morning Herald (20–21 September 2008): 30–31. ——, with Mark Rubbo. “Kate Grenville Interviewed by Mark Rubbo,” Readings: Melbourne (2 October 2008), http://www.readings.com.au/interview/kategrenville1 (accessed 25 September 2010). Huggan, Graham. Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2007). Keenan, Catherine. “A Historical Balancing Act,” The Age (20 September 2008), A2: 24–25. Koval, Ramona. “Books and Writing with Ramona Koval,” A B C Radio National (17 July 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm (accessed 25 September 2010).

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Reading Feminism in Kate Grenville’s Fiction —— S USAN S HERIDAN

I write as a way of exploring issues I don’t understand: writing about something is my way of thinking about it. Mainly, the issues I don’t understand have to do with women. Why might a woman choose to be a bag lady (Lilian’s Story)? Why do women stay in miserable marriages (Dreamhouse)? Why aren’t there more women in history books (Joan Makes History)? Where does misogyny come from and what does it feel like? (Dark Places)? I don’t write out of a theory about these issues, but in order to [. . . ] get under the skin of an issue, approaching it in a shamelessly subjective way – the way of intuition and empathy rather than the way of analysis [. . . ] Writing is a permitted way of exploring taboo subjects, or taking seriously subjects that are usually trivialised: and writing is a way of making visible the invisible biases of our culture.1

H

E R E I S A W A Y in which we might consider feminism in Kate Grenville’s fiction: as a perspective on the world, which makes “visible the invisible biases of our culture.” Feminism can be a way of problematizing the world in terms of sex, gender, and power, rather than as an ideology that provides ready-made answers. It is in this sense that her books can be read as feminist. They are works of the imagination, first and foremost: “speculative histories and experimental identities [.. .] are the kind of thing the novel does best.”2 Grenville’s early books are full of a recognizable feminist anger at the denigration of women and the compromises women are forced to make. Asking

1 2

Kate Grenville, “Why I Write,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994): 141. Grenville, “Why I Write,” 141.

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new questions about the world, they inevitably involve writing in new ways. Lilian’s Story, her third book, was a breakthrough into storytelling in the voice of a strong and eccentric woman. In Joan Makes History, she creates a similarly unconventional female figure who, in a variety of guises, undermines patriarchal histories and makes her own. Yet feminist fiction is not solely concerned with representations of women, or even female points of view. In her most challenging novel, Dark Places, Grenville narrates the story through the consciousness of Albion Singer in an attempt to understand misogyny of the kind that could lead a man to rape his daughter. Her powerful fictions demonstrate, too, that there is no single mode of writing that can be labelled feminist: for her, writing as a feminist has meant working in satirical, comic, gothic and other non-realist modes. Born in 1950, Kate Grenville is of the generation of women whose lives were transformed by the revival of feminism in the form of the women’s liberation movement: I remember reading The Female Eunuch, and I thought, this book is dynamite; if I go on reading it and allow myself to actually think about it, I will have to change my whole life, because this book is saying there’s something radically wrong with this whole thing of trying to be a woman.3

In this 1985 interview with Jennifer Ellison, she recalls feeling that, as a university student, it was acceptable to want a career and not marriage, even not to want children. Yet she wasn’t prepared to take on that “huge re-think” that she sensed was called for. Only later, when she was in her late twenties and living in London, did she meet feminists whom she felt she could trust and got involved in the women’s movement. Even so, that experience, with the anger that accompanied it, was marked by “confusion and uncertainty,” which she did not find reflected in contemporary women’s writing. For her, Americans like Erica Jong and Lisa Alther were too “cheery” and confident, while in Britain writers like Angela Carter and Michelene Wandor were writing “highly analytical feminist fiction, and I wasn’t one of those either [.. .] so I started writing out of that sort of frustration of there being no reflection anywhere of the reality that I seemed to be dealing with.”4 In London she went 3

Jennifer Ellison, Rooms of Their Own (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986): 160–61. Gerry Turcotte, “The Story-Teller’s Revenge: Kate Grenville Interviewed by Gerry Turcotte,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994): 147. 4

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through a “period of terrible fury [at men], which is fury at yourself, too.” But she was also sending out stories and getting some of them published. The intense anger is strongly evident in Bearded Ladies, her first book, but it is incorporated into the art of the stories, which are still, more than twenty years later, powerful sketches and explorations of female rebellion and conformity: “Bearded Ladies is the sort of angry place where feminism actually begins, when you suddenly see how the world is really working.”5 This, I think, is a key insight into the way feminism can turn a woman’s world upside down, alarmingly, and at the same time inspire her with a passion to tell this new truth. It is exhilarating and frightening at once. In this book there is no title story: the figure of the bearded lady, the circus freak, the woman who grotesquely mocks prescribed femininity and transgresses gender boundaries, stands behind the collection as both an incitement to rebellion and a warning of the punishment that such rebellion risks. ‘Bearded Ladies’ appear to have crossed all borders of sexual legitimacy and legibility. In the first story, “The Space Between,” its protagonist, Sandy, travelling in India on her own, signals her independence by her gender-neutral dress and name. Fellow tourists patronizingly offer her the companionship they feel she needs – an older couple who go arm-in-arm looking “like an advertisement for retirement,”6 a single man who “bulges heavily, thickly, unabashed, into the taut weight of stretched red nylon between his legs” (3). Yet another ‘space between’ is evoked in the story’s second scene, when Sandy is pursued by a mob of local children, who cannot tell from her appearance whether she is male or female, “boy or girl,” chanting “bah yo gel bah yo gel bah yo gel” (8). The harsh judgment of children on sexual outsiders is also the subject of “The Test Is, If They Drown,” a title alluding to the fate of witches. The tomboy narrator is drawn to the elderly Miss Spear, who lives alone with her cat, but is quick to denounce Miss Spear as a witch when she needs to reassert authority among her friends. The capacity for betrayal lurks in lesser forms in many of the stories, reflecting a distinctively female kind of rage at the way other women reflect back the narrator’s worst fears about herself. In “Making Tracks,” the protagonist is by no means pinioned by others’ perception of her failings, yet she is paralyzed. Events occur – or seem to. She 5

Gerry Turcotte, “Daughters of Albion,” in Eight Voices of the Eighties, ed. Gillian Whitlock (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1989): 43. 6 Kate Grenville, Bearded Ladies (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1984): 4–5. Further page references are in the main text.

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imagines dramatically rejoining her lover, a married man (or does she actually do it? Uncertainty is part of the telling). As they drive through the frozen northern landscape numerous misfortunes befall them, but the relationship is going nowhere. After they make love and he falls asleep, she sits by the fire: “She has a feeling that if she waits long enough something will happen but nothing does” (22). Early in the morning, she steals away and resumes her solo journey, empty. The deceptions and silences between women and men are also traced in more conventional sketches. The stories experiment with female narrative perspectives in various forms, some brief and impressionistic, others more exploratory. Grenville is exploring some of those huge gaps in human experience – female experience – that had never been written about, and that there was no way you could write about them in conventional terms. It somehow just wasn’t adequate to talk about them in terms of the conventional, and in nice neat language. The forces operating – anger, frustration, pain, loneliness – couldn’t be written about truthfully in neatly ordered fiction.7

Sexual experience was a major gap in women’s writing in the past, and is a prime locus of these forbidden feelings. Sexuality in various forms, and feelings of “anger, frustration, pain, loneliness,” are the principal material of Dreamhouse, Grenville’s first novel. It is an expansion of the short story “Country Pleasures,” from Bearded Ladies, which depicts the suffocating atmosphere of a miserable marriage between a young couple staying in a crumbling Tuscan villa. The novel gradually and indirectly reveals the sexual frustration that fuels tensions between Louise and Rennie. Dreamhouse is dream-like, mesmerizing but also nightmarish. Love’s young dream is anything but that. The style is gothic: the crumbling house surrounded by threatening flora and fauna, not to mention the neighbours – the mad old man who appears to be fucking his goat; the brother and sister who appear to be fucking each other; their father, the villa’s owner, who has his eye on Rennie. Rennie sexually rejects his young wife’s advances, or else insists on sodomizing her. Louise, as narrator, indulges herself in sadistic fantasies of Rennie coming to harm while she herself remains passive in the face of other people’s demands. As Rennie becomes disgusted by the older man’s advances, Louise is mesmerized by his daughter Viola. She fantasizes pushing her husband off the tower of the Duomo in Milan, and finally leaves him there. 7

Turcotte, “Daughters of Albion,” 38.

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There has been a good deal of perceptive commentary on these uses of gothic conventions, some of it recognizing that they belong to a long tradition in women’s writing. As Ellen Moers pointed out in one of the foundational texts of feminist literary criticism,8 female writers have used the gothic mode to emphasize women’s imprisonment in patriarchal power, often literally their imprisonment inside the house, the family. In rendering the familiar strange, and suggesting sinister sexual and deathly dangers, the gothic can be used to subvert the ideologies of domestic harmony and gender complementarity. As Grenville put it, “the Gothic suits tearing down, it suits the destruction of the old icons,”9 and this novel tears down not only the myth of masculine superiority but also that of feminine innocence. But while Grenville’s subversive gothic “gives expression to socially transgressive aspects of female sexuality and psychic life” it also draws attention to its own excesses, in comic and parodic ways. For example, the novel’s “parodic obsession with holes, including mouse-holes, snake-holes and clearings in the landscape” as well as bodily orifices, “is used to attack the misogynistic reduction of woman to sexual ‘hole’.”10 A more important innovation, in relation to Grenville’s later work, is the construction of Louise as the narrating consciousness, instead of an omniscient third-person narrator. Hardly a sympathetic character, Louise, with her potent mix of sadistic fantasies with the masochistic fearfulness of the conventional gothic heroine, expresses herself in a characteristically flat, affectless tone. Here, for example, a flock of tiny swallows fly at her and Rennie: I watched as three blurs converged on him, watched him duck and cringe as if he thought they were knives flying through the air. I knew the birds were not attacking us, but I could guess, too, that in the dusk an eyeball might seem as juicy a morsel as a midge. Rennie was crouching with his hands up protecting his face. He would stagger backwards, screaming, his hands over the blood pouring down his cheek, and stand waiting for me to run over and help him to the house.11

8

Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1977). Turcotte, “The Story-Teller’s Revenge,” 156. 10 Susan Midalia, “Re-Writing Woman: Genre Politics and Female Identity in Kate Grenville’s Dreamhouse,” Australian Literary Studies 16.1 (1993): 30–37. 11 Kate Grenville, Dreamhouse (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1986): 41. 9

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In Lilian’s Story (written after Dreamhouse but published before it), Lilian’s narrative voice is expansive, free from this solipsistic consciousness. Lilian calls the world into being, a world in which she occupies the central position, even when she is being persecuted by others, for her story is about how a woman gets to write her own life, rather than have it written for her. How a woman gets to turn her back on all the things women are supposed to want, and invent another set of priorities. How it feels to be a big loud rude active woman instead of a little meek polite one. Dreamhouse had been a book about passivity and lack of self-knowledge – the exact mirror image of that.12

Grenville described the process of discovering Lilian’s voice as a realization that “the voice she spoke with was the voice I wanted to write in. I knew I was going to enjoy that voice.” Her inspiration was Bea Miles, a notorious Sydney bag lady who would jump onto buses or even into taxis and give recitations from Shakespeare’s plays. But Lilian’s Story is not a biography. Before doing any research on Bea Miles, Grenville wrote several drafts of the book, free-associating “within the magnetic field, if you like, of the image of a big powerful woman whose empire was the streets of Sydney.”13 Lilian needs to be strong, for her story is a horrific one – a “catastrophic bildungsroman.”14 As the intelligent and observant daughter of disturbed parents – her father a domestic tyrant obsessed by his collection of facts, her mother intimidated and reclusive – she endures beatings as well as insults from her father, and begins to eat compulsively to armour her vulnerability. Her younger brother, by contrast, takes the line of least resistance, feigning deafness and trying to make himself invisible. At school, Lilian longs to be accepted by the other children and tries to impress the boys into letting her join their gang by committing deeds of bravery; but a “fatso girl” can never be a hero in their eyes.15 Consistently failing the tests of young ladyhood, she

12

Sue Woolfe, “Kate Grenville: Lilian’s Story,” in Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, ed. Kate Grenville & Sue Woolfe (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993): 97. 13 Woolfe, “Kate Grenville: Lilian’s Story,” 97. 14 Peter Craven, “The Gothic Grenville, or Kate Makes Rhetoric,” Scripsi 6.3 (1990): 252. 15 Kate Grenville, Lilian’s Story (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1986): 44– 45.
Further page references are in the main text.

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shines in school exams and wins a place at the university, which her father is persuaded to let her accept, since she is obviously not marriage material. There she makes friends with Joan, a rebellious girl who recognizes Lilian as another “woman of destiny” like herself (90), and two young men, F.J. Stroud (“I am officially a genius,” 79) and Duncan, with whom she climbs into a tree to swap Shakespeare quotations and sexual lore at genteel parties. Her father is salaciously curious about what she “gets up to” with these men and refuses to believe her answer: “We get up to Shakespeare.” Provoked by his scornful laughter at this reply, she fixes her gaze on the roses at the window: Then I could not stop, but felt my mouth shaping word after work, faster and faster, and on those hated pink roses saw page after page slipping over, thick with words. (95–96)

The father destroys her volume of Shakespeare and, not long after that, he comes across her naked in front of the mirror, and rapes her. Lilian is unable to speak to her mother or even her friends about this violation. She ‘goes bush’; she returns and begins to roam the streets at night. Her father, no longer able to threaten her with beatings, has her committed to a mental hospital and leaves her there for ten years. Nevertheless, Lilian is not broken into feminine submissiveness. She proves herself to be larger than her trauma, remaining eager to experience life in all its facets, continuing to ‘look for love’ like the strippers and transvestites, prostitutes, and drunks around her in King’s Cross, the heart of bohemian Sydney. She takes on her role as bard (Singer is her surname), reciting Shakespeare as she travels for free around the city, as Bea Miles did: “I was beginning to be a public figure and was enjoying the way people nudged each other and pointed. My story was beginning to have a part in the stories of others and I was becoming a small part of history” (185). Her story is, nevertheless, profoundly shaped by her father’s abuse. In her narrative, he is always “Father,” suggesting the symbolic significance of his role as the patriarch attempting to subdue the female he so despises and fears, to impose the Law of the Father. Lilian’s Story appeared at a time when feminist theorists, following the pioneering work of Juliet Mitchell,16 were well into their task of deconstructing and feminizing Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex. Much of this exploration of the darker underside of sexual politics was conducted in revisionary readings of literature: Christina Stead’s 16

Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).

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great novel The Man Who Loved Children, for example, was read as a study of incest and the daughter’s struggle to speak in her own language.17 In this context, Lilian’s struggle to speak, and to tell her own story, can be read as a crucial act of cultural defiance. Lilian’s story can also be read as an allegory of twentieth-century Australian national identity. Grenville invents a heroine born to a father named Albion in 1901, at the time of Federation. Lilian’s birth is attended by portents worthy of a Shakespearean drama: “Horses kicked down their stables. Pigs flew, figs grew thorns” (1). Her struggle against paternal authority takes her through the historical events of Depression and war, until Albion’s death. When her father torments her with his visits while she is incarcerated, Lilian thinks: Father seemed to have vanquished me, but I knew I was biding my time. I am biding my time, I said to myself behind my impermeable envelope of skin […] I knew that I had a head start on Father, that I was young and strong with years of nourishment and walking, while he was old, or would be soon, and was weakened, under that brittle carapace of his, by all his underground passions. (150)

Grenville reports having been impressed by the parallel drawn in Anne Summers’s study of women in Australian history, Damned Whores and God’s Police, “between the position of a colonised country like Australia and the ‘colonised’ position of women. That got me thinking about the colonial relationship as a metaphor” for other oppressive relationships.18 In her next novel, Grenville would address the questions of woman and history in a more sustained way. Joan Makes History, for which Grenville received a Bicentennial grant,19 was initially intended to redress the absence of women in patriarchal Australian histories, to spotlight women of achievement. What it ends up doing is 17

Susan Sheridan, “The Man Who Loved Children and the Patriarchal Family Drama,” in Gender, Politics and Fiction, ed. Carole Ferrier (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1985): 136–49. Veronica Brady considers the Stead and the Grenville novels together in her essay “The Men Who Loved Children” (1991), repr. in Veronica Brady, Caught in the Draught (Pymble, N S W : Angus & Robertson, 1994): 67–91. 18 Turcotte, “Daughters of Albion,” 43. 19 White Australia’s celebration of its two-hundredth anniversary in 1988 was an event long prepared for, and there were special literary grants and publications, among other things.

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to mock those conventional histories of white Australia which focused on heroic physical activities – sometimes pointless, often actually destructive – in which women played almost no part at all. Here the influence of Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police is again discernible – her critique of the exclusion of women from a patriarchal cultural tradition “preoccupied with men’s lives, searching for epochal dimensions.”20 In its predominantly comic critical mode, the novel undermines the significance accorded to such iconic events and figures as the First Fleet’s arrival, ‘settling’ the land, the gold rushes and so on. Convict Joan throws herself out of a First Fleet ship and swims to shore ahead of the official landing party; Aboriginal Joan uses the much-vaunted railway system to go walkabout from her white husband; Joan as servant witnesses her employer giving the local Aboriginal people poisoned flour. Plaited together with this legendary, ubiquitous, and multi-faced Joan is another Joan, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, at Federation. This Joan is successively a tomboy, a sexually adventurous young woman, a runaway wife, a ‘passing’ man who enjoys the chance to bully women. Having rejected conventional feminine aims “to marry a prospect, to be the colourless wife of an ambition, to wash the socks and underpants of a destiny,”21 Joan, in her need for love, is eventually brought to accept and embrace her fate as a wife and a mother. In a structural tour de force, the two sets of stories – that of the interloper determined to ‘make history’ and that of the anti-heroic failed rebel – echo and comment on each other, dovetailing together at the end. Historical Joan, now wife of the mayor of Castleton, attends the Federation ceremony (a brilliant evocation of the famous Tom Roberts painting of the opening of the first federal parliament, and of the ordinary folk who thronged around outside). Failing to share in the general rejoicing around her, she resolves to tell her granddaughter the details that would not appear in any of the history books, “peculiar, lopsided, absurd sorts of things [.. .] that would look silly in a book, and no-one would be tempted to make a bronze statue out of them” (261). Twentieth-century Joan, pushing her granddaughter’s pram, reflects with satisfaction that she has ‘made history’ after all, though not in the way she imagined: 20

Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1975): 85. 21 Kate Grenville, Joan Makes History (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988): 48. Further page references are in the main text.

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I thought my story was one the world had never heard before. I loved and was bored, I betrayed and was forgiven, I ran away and returned, and all these things appeared to be personal and highly significant history. Oh Joan, what bogus grandeur! There was not a single joy I could feel that countless Joans had not already felt, not a single mistake that I could make that had not been made by some Joan before me. (284)

The feminist perspective in this novel has strong affinities with what came to be known in the 1990s as ‘difference feminism’, re-valuing women’s differences from men rather than stressing their need to achieve equality by taking on traditionally male behaviours and values. But there was disagreement among feminist historians, for example, on this point. Joan Makes History attracted criticism from the feminist historian Jill Matthews for telling “a tale of two cultures: men’s has always been the more highly valued but women’s is just as good (for women) and should be recognized as such. A simple, idealist inversion of value.” From her point of view, Joan at the end “resigns herself to the knowledge that merely living everyday life is making history.”22 On the other hand, the four feminist historians who presented their book Creating a Nation as a new female-centred version of Australian history (it begins with an Aboriginal woman, Warraweer, giving birth at Sydney Cove in 179123) would not have seen Joan’s final insight as “resignation,” as it is quite congruent with their approach. Yet, as these writers also point out, to recognize women as historical actors, however marginalized from the centres of power, is also to recognize European women as beneficiaries of the dispossession of Aboriginal people.24 This perspective is also present in the novel’s feminism. Joan, at Federation, perceives that she and her husband, although “we were not in the business of stripping this land of all it had, and wringing profit out of every transaction [.. .] were accomplices” (258). Joan made her first appearance in Grenville’s fiction as a minor character in Lilian’s Story, a university friend of the heroine. In the next novel, Dark

22

Jill Julius Matthews, “ ‘ A Female of All Things’: Women and the Bicentenary,” Australian Historical Studies 23.91 (1988): 101. 23 Pat Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath & Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1994): 7. 24 Grimshaw, Lake, McGrath & Quartly, Creating a Nation, 1.

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Places,25 the central character is Albion Singer, Lilian’s father. Here Grenville set herself a huge challenge, which required a narrative mode far removed from Joan’s irreverent comedy: “in Lilian’s Story, I had shown what might happen when a father abuses a daughter, but I needed to know why.” Putting herself “in the head of this atrocious abuser,” and finding a voice for him in the letters of Charles Darwin, Grenville also found a shocking streak of misogyny “actually in me. We’re all taught to despise women.”26 Dark Places demonstrates the shocking observation about misogyny that Grenville would have read in Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch many years before: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” a comment that Greer proceeds to illustrate with graphic testimonials from men about their sexual disgust and their belief that women want to be raped.27 In Albion Gidley Singer, Grenville creates a prototype of Edwardian masculinity. He has “convinced the world and himself” that he has inhabited all his social roles, as gentleman, son, husband and father, with “exceptional completeness.”28 This certainty is achieved by the massive delusion that the rest of the world, in particular its female beings, are there for his benefit and that of other men of his class. Women are irreducibly other: they exist to serve him; they desire his body with its “organ of generation,” and admire his mind with its impressive armour of facts. Becoming the father of a daughter who takes after him and admires him with a “ferocity of love” (204) throws all his certainties into doubt: how can one of these inferior beings be so like him? Lilian, “no matter how brave and no matter how bright, would always belong to the secondary sex” (258). Albion feels mocked by her fullness of being (218), and is disgusted by her burgeoning sexuality. The discovery that she has begun menstruating brings a crisis; the child he had valued for her brain (“almost as good as a man’s”) was now being initiated into the “revolting secrets of female flesh”: 25

The title echoes Dark Places of the Heart, the American title of Christina Stead’s comparably ironic novel, Cotter’s England. In its American edition, Grenville’s Dark Places was re-titled Albion’s Story. 26 Interview with Norman Oder, Publishers Weekly (31 October 1994), http://www .users.bigpond.com/kgrenville/Interviews/Interviews.htm (accessed 27 January 2008). 27 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970; London: Flamingo / HarperCollins 1993): 279. 28 Kate Grenville, Dark Places (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1994): 1–2. Further page references are in the main text.

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I thought of all the breasts I had tweaked, all the thighs I had pinched, all the mouths I had crushed under mine; I thought of all those orifices, slimy or dry, tight or flaccid and I saw them in a sudden blazing new light. (240–41)

His daughter was only a woman after all. Here there are strong echoes of Sam Pollitt in Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, telling his daughter Louie, “You are myself,” and then fossicking around in her room to inspect her underwear and her reading matter.29 In a wildly comic scene when Lilian is older and has a boyfriend, Duncan, Albion follows them, with “much cleverness with hat-brims and newspapers,” across the city and into the bush at South Head, planning to catch them in flagrante delicto, to see “my daughter rutting like a bitch in heat” (312–13). The father’s language betrays his obsession with his daughter’s sexuality, though he is convinced that he is only doing his duty – and that other men will mock him if it becomes known that his daughter is out of control. Yet all he sees, from his sweaty and prickly hiding place, is the two of them sitting on a rock with their feet in the water, declaiming poetry to one another. Cheated of this expected intervention, he is all the more dismayed to see Lilian and Duncan exchange tender looks – the father is rendered doubly invisible (325). Yet this feeling of dismay, and its significance, is kept in a separate compartment from those feelings that he registers in the rape scene. He hunts Lilian down, spies on her admiring her body in the bathroom mirror, and attacks her, hissing, “You are vile and degenerate.” When she gives up fighting and withdraws, “leaving only her shell behind, the way a lizard leaves its tail in your hand,” he finds that his social shell, this “pillar of the community,” was able to “tiptoe away and leave in charge of the situation the nameless secret speck of being who lived within” (343). This dissociation, and his capacity to see Lilian as an extension of himself, are horribly realized in the act of rape: Oh, epiphany of flesh! I surrendered myself to myself, and now, as never before, my skin separated me from nothing at all. I and myself were blissfully joined, and for once there was no voice judging, chiding, doubting, fearing [. . . ] I burst with the heat of bliss, and in a blaze of cells like the creation of life from mud, I gave birth to myself.

29

Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (1944; Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1970): 164, 340.

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After I was made whole in my daughter there was silence in heaven. (344)

This is a classic male fantasy of self-creation, achieved by annihilating the actual woman to claim life-creating power for himself. Albion is ultimately left an empty shell in his empty house, still convinced of his righteousness. To explore the heart of the patriarch, Grenville has achieved a tour de force of savage irony in sustaining the vicious and selfdeluding persona of Albion Singer. To write in the voice of a gutsy woman was an experience that she found liberating. To write a whole novel in the voice of a loathsome man is something else again, and must have required untold reserves of courage and persistence. Dark Places is significantly different from Lilian’s Story in structure as well as tone. As the story of a life, it is also arranged in three parts, covering the protagonist’s childhood, youth, and adulthood. But where the earlier work’s cinematic fragments, diverse enough to suggest a whole world, are held together by the energy of Lilian’s being, Dark Places is a series of monologues where the reader hears only Albion’s voice, and is constantly aware of Albion’s ego imposing itself on the world. In the process of writing Dark Places, Grenville said, she became less interested in seeing patriarchal oppression from a man’s point of view and more interested in “a notion that patriarchy is bound up with a kind of ruthless law-of-the-jungle set of political or philosophical beliefs,” which include “the market place as jungle, the weak must go under, the trickle down effect, there is no equality in nature so why should there be in the affairs of men.” 30 These deepest beliefs of patriarchy are, as she observed at the time, “a very topical thing to be thinking about.” Fifteen years and a global financial crisis later, neoliberalism has been shaken but not dislodged. In an attempt to argue imaginatively against these beliefs, she was trying to show that there are “moral imperatives as well as power imperatives,” the only ones that Albion and his ilk recognize. Dark Places has received relatively little critical attention, despite its power. Perhaps this is because neither women nor men wish to see misogyny in such close-up terms. The least popular face of feminism is its analysis of the patriarchy that is so bound up in every aspect of personal as well as political life. It is not surprising to learn that Grenville faltered in her belief that she

30

Turcotte, “The Story-Teller’s Revenge,” 156, 157. Subsequent quotations in this paragraph are from the same source.

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could finish this book, and that she hoped to be able “to write something richer and thicker and more humane than I feel I’m writing at the moment,” as she put it in a 1986 interview.31 Kate Grenville’s more recent novels, The Idea of Perfection, The Secret River, and The Lieutenant, take on less explicit feminist themes, and so our present discussion can end here, though it could be expanded. Just as feminist ideas are now more embedded in the culture – although they are still often contested – so too are they embedded in her later work. Indeed, Michael Ackland sees all her fiction as having been “directly shaped by her changing feminist convictions.”32 Those convictions have expanded, like feminist ideas generally over the past two decades, to include anticolonialism and antiracism in their framework. No longer satisfied with seeing colonization as a metaphor for women’s oppression, Grenville addresses its reality in the foreground of her fictional world.

WORKS CITED Ackland, Michael. “Kate Grenville,” in Australian Writers 1975–2000, ed. Selina Samuels (Detroit M I : Gale Research, 2006): 128–34. Brady, Veronica. “The Men Who Loved Children” (1991), repr. in Caught in the Draught (Pymble, N S W : Angus & Robertson, 1994): 67–91. Craven, Peter. “The Gothic Grenville, or Kate Makes Rhetoric,” Scripsi 6.3 (1990): 238–58. Ellison, Jennifer. Rooms of Their Own (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986). Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch (1970; London: Flamingo, 1993). Grenville, Kate. Bearded Ladies (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1984). ——. Dark Places (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1994). ——. Dreamhouse (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1986). ——. Interview with Norman Oder, Publisher’s Weekly (31 October 1994), http: //www.users.bigpond.com/kgrenville/Interviews/Interviews.htm ——. Joan Makes History (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988). ——. Lilian’s Story (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1986). ——. “Why I Write,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994): 141–42.

31

Ellison, Rooms of Their Own, 162, 166. Michael Ackland, “Kate Grenville,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 325: Australian Writers, 1975–2000, ed. Selina Samuels (Detroit M I : Gale Research, 2006): 128–34. 32

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Reading Feminism in Kate Grenville’s Fiction

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——, & Sue Woolfe. Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993). Grimshaw, Pat, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath & Marian Quartly. Creating a Nation (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1994). Matthews, Jill Julius. “ ‘ A Female of All Things’: Women and the Bicentenary,” Australian Historical Studies 23.91 (1988): 90–102. Midalia, Susan. “Re-Writing Woman: Genre Politics and Female Identity in Kate Grenville’s Dreamhouse,” Australian Literary Studies 16.1 (1993): 30–37. Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). Moers, Ellen. Literary Women (Garden City N Y : Anchor, 1977). Sheridan, Susan. “The Man Who Loved Children and the Patriarchal Family Drama,” in Gender, Politics and Fiction, ed. Carole Ferrier (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1985): 136–49. Stead, Christina. The Man Who Loved Children (1940; Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1970). Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia (1975; Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 2nd ed. 2002). Turcotte, Gerry. “Daughters of Albion,” in Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers, ed. Gillian Whitlock (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1989): 36–48. Originally published as “Telling Those Untold Stories: An Interview with Kate Grenville,” Southerly 47.3 (September 1987): 284–99. ——. “ ‘ The Story-Teller’s Revenge’: Kate Grenville Interviewed by Gerry Turcotte,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994): 147–58.

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Kate Grenville as Public Intellectual —— B RIGID R OONEY

The voice of debate might stimulate the grey cells, and the dry voice of “facts” might lull us into being comfortable, even relaxed. But it takes the voice of fiction to get the feet walking in a new direction.1

T

H E S E W O R D S A R E K A T E G R E N V I L L E ’ S , from her inaugural Thea Astley lecture at the 2005 Byron Bay Writers Festival. The Festival was held in August, a few months after publication of The Secret River and not long after Grenville’s Radio National Book Show interview, with Ramona Koval, during which she made her much-discussed offthe-cuff remark that a novelist could “stand up on a stepladder and look down” at the ‘history wars’. On the ladder, a novelist could stand “outside the fray, and say there is another way to understand it.”2 That image attracted the ire of historians. In his December 2005 Australian Financial Review essay “Writing the Past,” Mark McKenna took issue with Grenville’s remarks and

1

Kate Grenville, “Saying the Unsayable,” First Thea Astley Memorial Lecture, in Making Waves: 10 Years of the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, ed. Marele Day, Susan Bradley Smith & Fay Knight (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2006): 9. 2 Ramona Koval’s interview with Grenville was first broadcast on 17 July 2005 and rebroadcast in the A B C ’s summer programme on 8 January 2006. In “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” (Quarterly Essay 23, October 2006), Clendinnen incorrectly notes the latter repeat broadcast as the date of the original interview. Though this is a pedantic point, it needs to be noted for accuracy about the order of responses and interventions that ensued. McKenna’s complaint, in his Australian Financial Review essay in December 2005, was in response to that first (that is, July 2005) broadcast. Thus, though it was not the only trigger for debate, Grenville’s ‘ladder’ remark in the Koval interview was a significant catalyst – that is, a chief provocation was the author’s public performance, about the book, not just the book itself.

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with the proposal, also mounted by others, that imaginative fiction affords readers a more privileged, truthful or engaging encounter with the past than does the discipline of history. In her Thea Astley lecture, no doubt unaware of the debate brewing in response both to her novel and her interview comments, Grenville continued to promote the special power of fiction to imaginatively access a past that, in her view, had remained opaque and secreted within Australia’s colonial archive. Her lecture emphasized the public consciousnessraising role of the literary writer who, confronted with the bland facts of official documents in these archives, could “tear through the screen of words to see what’s behind it.”3 What interests me about Grenville’s lecture, among other things, is the claim it makes for the public intellectual role of a writer of literary fiction. Even though she uses no such grandiose labels, the public intellectual role of literary writers is exactly what the lecture asserts in terms that render the claim natural and routine. Indeed, literary fiction, at least in Australia, has drawn as much relevance and legitimacy from its public role of speaking to hearts and minds – from its imagined access to the power to get “feet walking in a new direction” – as it has from elitist or disinterested art-for-art’s-sake principles. I would go so far as to suggest that these otherwise opposed aspirations – the desire of writers or artists, on the one hand, to engage with worldly, political matters and, on the other, to draw back or disengage from worldly demands – create a recurring, reciprocal dynamic. This dynamic suggests the logic that remains, even now, integral to if not generative of a contemporary national literature, testifying to the endurance of the national and, indeed, as Pascale Casanova suggests, to the continuing mutuality of national and global literary spaces.4 Especially now, one might add. The proliferation of digital technologies bringing the democratization of the means of cultural production – so that everyone can now be an author – has broken down what had earlier seemed an orderly, structured public sphere within which literary production held a privileged and relatively stable value. In this context, the public intellectual role of the literary writer – overlapping with but distinguishable from the ubiquitous category of the celebrity – has become an avenue not simply 3

These same elements from Kate Grenville’s Thea Astley lecture have also been discussed by the historian Tom Griffiths in his essay “Truth and Fiction: Judith Wright as Historian,” Australian Book Review 283 (August 2006): 25. 4 See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, tr. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2004): 108.

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Kate Grenville as Public Intellectual

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for addressing but also for expanding national readerships and renewing the vectors that constitute the nation’s public sphere. Grenville also invoked the example of A Kindness Cup, Astley’s 1974 novel, which had attended to the violence of Queensland’s frontier history some years in advance of new revisionist histories and decades in advance of the popular movement for reconciliation. Astley was perhaps a little less precocious than Grenville suggests, since she was writing during the Whitlam era when Indigenous civil- and land-rights activist movements were resurgent. The frontier novels by both Astley and Grenville, furthermore, can be seen in relation to the longer history of Australian literary and cinematic texts from Prichard’s Coonardoo to Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land and Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia, which, as Richard Nile points out, opened a vault of public memory and which were almost alone in breaching what Stanner called, in 1968, the “Great Australian Silence.”5 Beyond the 1970s, such literary works were joined and eventually eclipsed, in the role of awakening collective memory, by works of Australian history.6 Since then, and especially since the 1990s, the appetite and readership for Australian history, along with a wider range of non-fictional literary genres like memoir and biography, have increased. It is also important, however, to acknowledge that – like Astley’s novel – Australian revisionist history did not come from nowhere. It also owed much to 1960s and 1970s Indigenous activism. This is merely to emphasize that such intersections and the intellectual debts they entail are usually complex rather than simple. Placing herself in a tradition of white women writers like Astley, Grenville shows both an awareness of and some blindness to these historically interactive currents. The belief she expresses that the voice of fiction can “get the feet walking in a new direction” – perhaps a fantasy of public impact also shared by academics – has proven both true and false. I am not suggesting that writers don’t have an impact on social change – rather, I am pointing out that historical and cultural movements are often what galvanize writer–intellectuals, rather than the other way round. By her own report, it was Grenville’s personal experience of the 250,000-strong Reconciliation Walk in 2000, across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, that inspired her 5

W.E.H. Stanner, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians: An Anthropologist’s View (1968 Boyer Lecture; Sydney: A B C , 1969). 6 Richard Nile, “The Conceits of Silence,” Australian (16 April 2008), http://blogs .theaustralian.news.com.au/richardnile/index.php/theaustralian/comments/the_conceits _of_silence/ (accessed 30 April 2008).

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to embark on the project that led to The Secret River. So it is also true to say that many feet already walking in a new direction got her fiction moving. In turn, it is not unreasonable to claim that Grenville’s fiction further spurs the momentum. Until recently at least, Kate Grenville has not been quite so prominent in public debate as several other Australian women writer–intellectuals, such as Helen Garner, Germaine Greer, and Inga Clendinnen: at the time of my writing, her name had not yet appeared alongside theirs in mostly white- and male-dominated lists of the top ten or top one hundred Australian public intellectuals.7 There is a strong case, however, for regarding Grenville as a public intellectual. She is a literary writer whose works, as I will argue, exhibit consistent engagement with nation, and her impact has grown over time. Indeed, it is the national orientation of Grenville’s writing that most consistently defines her fiction as literary, even as its increasing accessibility has seen an expansion in her readership. This orientation was confirmed with the publication of The Secret River and, indeed, of her latest book, The Lieutenant (2008). Grenville’s contribution as a writer who has also demonstrably adopted the role of public intellectual can be considered from various angles, allowing several issues to be addressed. These concern not just the author’s own individual writing and career, but also the interaction of the categories of literature and nation in the public domain. Grenville’s case also sheds light on the contexts that construct public intellectual status and authority. Although Grenville, in her interviews and commentary, comes across as thoughtful and down-to-earth rather than as provocative, she has nonetheless managed to provoke at least one controversy, as outlined above. This occasion presents a neatly bounded instance of the dynamics of public intellectual debate. In this essay, I reconsider the Secret River debate against the background of Grenville’s literary career and in relation to issues of public intellectual authority. I suggest some of the factors that have influenced the choices and turns Grenville has made in her literary career, up to the present, and how these have signalled her increasingly public engagement with nation.

7

See, for example, the Australian Public Intellectual Network, which has published its list of 40: “The A P I Network Top Australian Public Intellectuals,” http://www.apinetwork.com/main/index.php?apply=&webpage=default&cID=16&PHPSESSID=&m enuID=50; see also Michael Visontay, “Australia’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Sydney Morning Herald (12 March 2005): 9.

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Kate Grenville as Public Intellectual

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Grenville’s Literary–Public Career: Re-Imagining the View After seven years spent working and travelling in England, Europe, and the U S A , during which time she also completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Colorado University, in 1983 Grenville returned to Australia in possession of several works-in-progress, ready to turn a fresh gaze on its culture.8 Her literary career could not have begun more auspiciously, with publication in 1984 of Bearded Ladies, a volume of short stories that sampled distinctively feminist themes and showed her penchant for darkly humorous grotesquerie. This was swiftly followed by what many readers still regard as the best of her works: the spirited, critically acclaimed, Australian/ Vogel-prize-winning Lilian’s Story (1985), her fictional re-creation of the legendary Sydney eccentric Bea Miles. Lilian’s Story attracted enthusiastic praise from Patrick White, a ringing endorsement like no other for a young Australian woman writer. The proto-feminist Bea, a woman affectionately remembered by many Sydneysiders, was an ideal subject for an Australian feminist literary novel. Grenville’s first-person narration projects Lilian as a buoyant personality whose survival instinct and refusal of patriarchal repression exhibited an emancipatory feminist impulse. As such, the novel also spoke to a widespread white Australian desire, in the 1980s, to throw off a narrowly Anglo-colonial heritage. Perhaps signalling the orientation of her fiction as both representatively feminist and representatively Australian, Grenville’s next book was funded by the Australian Bicentenary Authority.9 The result was an episodic, picaresque sampling of Australia’s past in Joan Makes History (1988). Although its critical reception was mixed (it was generally not considered equal to Lilian’s Story), Joan was custom-made for the bicentenary, addressing its broad na8

Grenville’s novella Dreamhouse (1984) and the collection Bearded Ladies (1984) were both shortlisted for the Australian / Vogel Literary Award, but it was Lilian’s Story that ultimately carried off the prize. The publication within three years of these three books gives a distorted impression of the pace at which Grenville usually works. The gap between her novels seems to average out at four to six years. Within these time-frames she has also published textbooks that support the teaching of creative writing, where her own contribution has been significant, as well as profiling the approaches of key contemporary Australian writers [AustLit database]. 9 As mentioned by Don Anderson in his review “You’ve Met Joan – Our Everywoman,” Sydney Morning Herald (30 April 1988), Spectrum: 70.

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tional project of representing a socially and culturally progressive Australia. Joan also suggested Grenville’s awareness of and engagement with a new feminist academic historiography, seeking to redress the absence of women from Australian history. It therefore seems perfectly accurate to say, as Michael Ackland does, for example, that Grenville’s fiction has been “directly shaped by her feminist convictions.”10 Yet, while this was certainly so in the 1980s, Grenville’s subsequent fiction began to shift: her novels’ engagement with feminism was overtaken by a preoccupation with the broader category of nationhood. Indeed, the shifting preoccupations in Grenville’s fictions show a strong consonance with shifting national moods. A factor in this adaptability has arguably been Grenville’s close relation to the literary academy during a significant phase in Australian literary publishing. As others have observed,11 the Whitlam government’s injections into cultural infrastructure temporarily improved conditions for the publication of literary fiction, which proliferated and diversified during the 1980s. Most of the present elite of Australian fiction writers, including Grenville herself, began their careers in the early 1980s, contributing to a current unevenness in the literary field.12 The 1980s also saw the increasing profes10

Michael Ackland, “Kate Grenville,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol.

325: Australian Writers, 1975–2000, ed. Selina Samuels (Detroit M I : Gale Research, 2006): 128. 11

Hilary McPhee observes that, had it not been for Whitlam government investment in the arts, a generation of new writers would have left Australia and not returned. See her Other People’s Words (Sydney: Pan Macmillan / Picador, 2001): 122–23. For the key scholarly study of this phase in Australian literature, see Ken Gelder & Paul Salzman, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–1988 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989). 12 See Mark Davis, interviewed by Ramona Koval, A B C Radio National Book Show (14 April 2008), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2214430 .htm (accessed 30 April 2008): “Well, you look at Cormac McCarthy or Kate Grenville or Richard Flanagan or Peter Carey, and so on. There’s a little group of big selling. . . Tim Winton is another one. . . big selling writers at the top. Then you’ve got a very long tail of not very big selling writers, and in between there is a big gap, and this is a change. Twenty or 30 years ago that middle was actually the healthiest part of the sector, now the middle has hollowed out. I think the interesting thing here is that we’ve got the producers, we’ve got the publishers, they’re doing well, it’s about developing readerships and it’s about getting people reading literary fiction. If you want that middle to grow then you have to grow audiences.”

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Kate Grenville as Public Intellectual

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sionalization of Australian literary culture and strengthened ties between writers and the academy with the introduction of tertiary creative writing programmes. Teaching in tertiary writing courses now provides an income stream for writers, especially those who are established but not financially independent. Grenville’s own highly professional approach to writing – her way of conceiving writing as process, a craft that can be learned and taught – is a product of and makes an ongoing contribution to this institutional development. Ironically, the boom in tertiary creative writing programmes has accompanied an erosion in the perceived value of academic literary criticism, which, for a time, had played an important role in disseminating and canonizing Australian literary works. After her overtly feminist fiction of the 1980s, Grenville’s next novel, Dark Places (1994), signalled her shift away from a gynocentric approach to one that was more in tune with an idea of gender as an embodied social construction – an idea that allowed masculinity to come into view. In the 1990s, gender-focused inquiry was an emerging trend in women’s and cultural studies within the academy, and this had its counterparts in the broader culture as well. Grenville’s first-person narrative, told from the viewpoint of Albion Singer, the brutal but ultimately pathetic father of Lilian’s Story, conducts a feminist anatomy of the patriarch-as-misogynist. Here, early on in the narrative, he speaks of himself in the third person, intimating a self-disgust that is both compelling and somewhat at odds with his characteristic self-delusion: Albion Gidley Singer was also a large and cumbersome suit of armour wheeled around the world, made to speak and smile and shake hands, by some other, very much punier person within: some ant-like being who did not know anything at all, an embattled and lonely atom whose existence seemed suspected by no one.13

Dark Places demonstrates Grenville’s increasing interest in adopting and exploring the perspective of flawed male characters. This broadened gender focus, in turn, provides a conduit for narrative occupation of both male and female perspectives and opens the way for the creation of fictional perspectives on broadly national concerns. It must therefore have been discomforting for Grenville to read Ivor Indyk’s devastating review of Dark Places, in which he pointed out some patterns of which she herself would not have been entirely unaware: 13

Kate Grenville, Dark Places (Sydney: Macmillan, 1994): 6.

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It is not for me to lecture the author of The Writing Book on the limitations of the first-person narrator, but that is where the problem lies. Albion tells his own story in the first person – the “I” fills the stage, no one else gets a look in. The same technique is used in all of Grenville’s novels. Moreover her characters never engage in extended conversation. They are usually presented by the “I” as throwing stereotyped tags at each other, like characters in comic strips. The subtle nuances of human interactions are banished – nothing is experienced directly, everything is reported, and always from the same angle.14

That this criticism delivered a rude shock and was taken to heart is evident from the subsequent direction of Grenville’s fiction. In her next two novels, she abandoned her favoured first-person narrative technique altogether, adopting third-person focalized narration that allowed her to multiply perspectives. In The Idea of Perfection (1999), the story is told from the perspective of three characters – Harley Savage, Douglas Cheeseman, and Felicity Porcelline – who jointly dramatize the novel’s central questions about love and (im) perfection. In her acknowledgements for this novel, Grenville thanks Indyk for his feedback on the manuscript. Reflecting later on its success, she observed: In my past work, there has been a problem between men and women, but in this one, I seemed to have bridged that gap between male and female. I seem to have come through the darkness to the other side.15

As a couple whose shy awakening to love after bitter experience is the heart of the story, Harley and Douglas are affectionately portrayed, ordinary, flawed white Australians brought together by destiny in a dying country town. Felicity Porcelline is their foil, a hideous and pathetic creation not unlike Albion Singer, whose lineaments spring from something gothic, even misogynistic, lurking in Grenville’s imagination.16 Felicity is a woman whose perfect 14

Ivor Indyk, “Lilian’s Graceless Encore,” Weekend Australian (9–10 July 1994), Review: 7. 15 Quoted in Matt Condon, “A Great Idea,” Sun Herald (29 July 2001), Sunday Life: 30. 16 Grenville herself has speculated about what the writing of Dark Places implied about her own potential misogyny, or about the misogyny of the woman writer: “we all breathe the air of misogyny. For women […] We are the people whom we loathe”; Grenville, quoted in Peter Craven, “Albion’s Story,” The Age (23 July 1994), Saturday Extra: 7.

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Kate Grenville as Public Intellectual

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mask barely conceals her monstrous suburban vacuity. Her relationship with the Chinese butcher, which is clearly intended to work as a satire on suburbia’s barely suppressed fears and fantasies about racial Others, also manifests itself as discomfortingly voyeuristic. Like Harley’s patchwork quilting, which depends for its vibrancy on the alternation of light and dark fabrics,17 Grenville’s novel derives its peculiar texture and meaning from its combination of strange characters, from its juxtaposition of love and monstrosity. While The Idea of Perfection and The Secret River demonstrate that there remains some continuity in Grenville’s feminist convictions, these novels are more accurately described as postfeminist in mood and orientation. With their omniscient narration and shared male–female perspectives, they foreground heterosexual, connubial relations. Although heterosexual coupledom features in most of Grenville’s books, the tone shifts in these later novels, so that the relationships represented are less concerned with feminism and patriarchal power and more with representing communal concerns and national moods. Douglas Cheeseman and Harley Savage are imperfect middle-aged people – damaged goods. As we learn from Douglas about the condemned bridge – a locus of tension between past and future forces, between local values and global pressures – damage was the very thing that had made it strong. In her essay on the role of the gum-tree in Australian literary fiction, Susan Martin cogently observes of Grenville’s timber bridge, built from eucalypts, that it represents “the benign view we wish to cultivate of our founding timbers, our underlying structure.”18 Grenville’s novel is also more benign, softening its earlier feminist strains and bending her fiction to the subtle accommodation of national sensitivities, prevalent in the late 1990s, about the past, about national character and about community. Placing representative national figures in a quaint provincial setting, The Idea of Perfection conveys the damaged insularity and increased cultural nostalgia of late-1990s Australia. At the end of that decade, the desire for reconciliation had manifested itself as a grass-roots movement. Yet this was a period of conservative political backlash, related, as Hugh Mackay has frequently argued, to a desire to turn inwards.19 Factors contributing to this altered 17

Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection (Sydney: Picador, 2000): 206–209. See Susan K. Martin, “The Wood From the Trees: Taxonomy and the Eucalypt as the New National Hero in Recent Australian Writing,” J A S A L 3 (2004): 89. 19 See Hugh Mackay, Advance Australia … Where? How We’ve Changed, Why We’ve Changed, and What Will Happen Next? (Sydney: Hachette Livre Australia, 2007). 18

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national mood, as many have observed, included recession and restructuring of the Australian economy, changes that markedly affected traditional working-class and rural sectors of the electorate. Such factors may partly explain the nostalgia for Australia’s rural, provincial past as revealed in the immense popularity of an A B C drama series, Sea Change, broadcast from 1998 to 2001. Sea Change, with its focus on an insular, coastal community and its storyline connecting urban white Australians in retreat from high-octane professional careers with ordinary, down-to-earth Australians, bore more than a passing resemblance to Grenville’s Idea of Perfection (1999). The novel’s preoccupation with personal and national healing after trauma relays the anxieties of the period, its currents of insularity and woundedness, its air of midlife crisis. The collapse of the socially progressive national agendas of preceding decades was no doubt felt acutely by many in Grenville’s likely readership. Even so, the initial response to The Idea of Perfection by reviewers in the broadsheet media was merely lukewarm. These critical reviews, however, proved unreliable predictors of the novel’s success, as its circulation was soon augmented by its word-of-mouth popularity. Grenville is reported as commenting that There is an incredible divide in this country between the literati and the popular. This seems to be my most popular book. Women have run across traffic and stopped to say what they thought of The Idea of Perfection.20

Indeed, Grenville’s novel exemplified an emerging trend in publishing in the 1990s, one that has continued since that time, towards accessible (or middlebrow) literary fiction. The Australian literary market had seen a proliferation of non-fiction books, particularly of memoir and biography, and ‘public intellectual’ works, against which literary fiction now had to compete.21 Grenville’s criticism, above, of the ‘literati’ as out of touch with the people offers a rationale for the literary writer’s turn to the ‘middlebrow’, for the embrace of the popular. Like Harley’s love for the home-made objects of a vanishing folk

20

Quoted in Matt Condon, “A Great Idea.” David Carter identified this shift in literary book cultures in Australia in “Public Intellectuals, Book Culture and Civil Society,” Australian Humanities Review (December 2001), http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December-2001 /carter2.html (accessed 16 June 2008). 21

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culture, and for the idiosyncratic and homely craft of quilt-making, Grenville’s resistance to elitist conceptions of writing underwrites a logic that enables her renegotiation of literary fiction for a middlebrow readership – an educated readership inclusive of those most interested in the national culture. This repositioning of the literary for a broader readership has characterized the careers, as I have argued elsewhere, of a number of contemporary Australian writers.22 The contours of reception of The Idea of Perfection would shift again, markedly, in response to the international recognition and publicity brought by the award of the lucrative Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction in 2001. Ironically and revealingly, this award was not without controversy: Grenville’s book was reported to have won out against Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and others mainly because it pleased the all-male ‘shadow’ jury which had been newly instituted to address perceptions of gender bias on the all-female panel. Four years later, Grenville produced her next major work of fiction, The Secret River – again using third-person narrative but this time mainly focalized through its male protagonist. The Secret River not only represents a continuation and intensification of the national focus implied in The Idea of Perfection but also situates the author firmly as a public intellectual oriented to and engaged in significant national debate.

The Secret River: The ‘Taking Up’ of Public Intellectual Territory A beautifully crafted yet in many ways aesthetically conventional work, Grenville’s The Secret River is the transmuted outcome of her research on the history of her elusive ancestor, Solomon Wiseman. The novel tells the story of the convict–settler William Thornhill and his wife Sal, but is primarily organized around William’s viewpoint. We follow his journey from his birth into the underclass of industrial London through his career as a Thames waterman, his desperate struggle for an economic foothold and subsequent slide into penury and petty theft, followed by his transportation with Sal and their growing family to New South Wales. Thornhill’s is the exemplary tale 22

For this argument, see, for example, my essay “The Sinner, the Prophet, and the Pietà: Sacrifice and the Sacred in Helen Garner’s Narratives,” Antipodes 19.2 (2005): 159–65.

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of an emancipist who ‘takes up’ a plot of land on the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury River. His need for security, respectability, and upward social mobility and his goal of refashioning himself from convict to gentleman are fused with his newfound desire for his own bit of earth, his one hundred acres. A brief opening chapter, “Strangers,” presents an uncanny encounter between Thornhill and a threatening, spear-carrying Aboriginal man who materializes from the darkness, only to echo Thornhill’s hollow warning, “Be off!” This, it turns out, is the symbolic prelude to Thornhill’s journey from his old life in London to his new life in the colony, “a place, like death, from which men did not return […] He would die here under these alien stars, his bones rot in this cold earth”.23 In the end, Thornhill does not die, but complicity with frontier violence, against his better nature, results in a death-in-life outcome, a hauntedness. Thornhill secures material possession of the land only by sacrificing what symbolic or moral legitimacy he might otherwise have been granted. His story is therefore both tragic and emblematic: what he loses is the innocent openness of his relationship with Sal and, in a Faustian sense, some part of his soul. The inexorable secret corruption of the ideal heterosexual coupledom of William and Sal becomes the novel’s powerful, if familiar, metaphor for the blighted foundation of the white settler nation. Thornhill’s innocence – his innate goodness yet vulnerability to temptation – makes him a particularly effective conduit for contemporary reader identification. As Sue Kossew observes, this viewpoint offers a kind of doubled perspective on settler-colonial experience of the frontier, revealing both its destructive effect and the potential for understanding.24 Thornhill’s intuitive, emotionally charged yet intelligent perspective is freighted with the implied gaze of the present-day reader who searches for the obscure moment of crosscultural contact, wanting to glimpse the choices that then confronted the settlers, to see their limits and the unfolding of frontier history. This identificatory novelistic structure, which transports the contemporary reader into an imagined past, is precisely what troubles the historian John Hirst, since it betrays Thornhill’s character as the mere fabrication or projection of a modern liberal sensibility. For Hirst, Grenville’s narrative panders to the desires of

23

Kate Grenville, The Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2005): 4. Sue Kossew, “Voicing the ‘Great Australian Silence’: Kate Grenville’s Narrative of Settlement in The Secret River,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42.2 (2007): 11. 24

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present-day Australian readers of a particular class and politics, and remains blind to historical and cultural difference.25 Yet The Secret River was something more than a history masquerading as fiction, or a fiction masquerading as history: it presented itself, and was marketed and received, as an intervention in contemporary debates about Australia’s past. It constituted an intentional public intellectual utterance with the capacity, based on Grenville’s status as a high-profile literary author, to engage a general readership, one that coincided with but also extended beyond the academy. The question of fiction writers’ use and abuse of history was inflamed by Grenville’s unguarded remarks to Ramona Koval about being perched on a ladder above and beyond the fray. This remark, which spurred Mark McKenna and others to counter-attack, contributed to a meta-debate that referred its contributors back to the field of public intellectual endeavour itself. This debate, largely confined to broadsheet and quality print media, was motivated by questions about how public authority is currently accessed or realized by different players, and what access these players have to publics, readerships, and generalized media circuits beyond strictly defined fields (whether literary or academic). In the debate about Grenville’s The Secret River, the role of historians-as-public-intellectuals was pitted against the role of novelists-as-public-intellectuals. At stake in this contest was the relative legitimacy of these groups in the eyes of what, in reality, is a small but important niche-market for Australian quality publishing. This market is made up of educated readers who attend book festivals, read the quality broadsheets, and listen to the national broadcaster, a group that differs from but significantly overlaps with the even more specialized and restricted Australian market for academic or scholarly books. Access to this restricted readership is particularly contested in a small national market, and it is in this context that rivalry between an Australian novelist interested in offering a national ‘parable’ of the past and professional scholars or academics in the field of Australian history demands to be considered. The public profile, professional impact, and national significance of intellectuals in Australia are contingent on attracting the interest of this (dual) readership. The launch of The Secret River into the quality mediasphere began a chain reaction of responses. It is instructive to look at how the sequence unfolded over six to nine months, and to recall who precisely was involved, for what 25

John Hirst, Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (Melbourne: Black Inc,

2005): 84–85.

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this shows about the contingent, somewhat restricted and narrow base of media discussion that so often passes as national debate. Only a few, wellknown respondents were needed to produce the effect of public debate. Apart from Grenville herself, those who published the key opinion-pieces in the media in response to her novel were three publicly prominent historians: Mark McKenna, John Hirst, and Inga Clendinnen, all professional historians with considerable heft in the field, though (interestingly in view of their unanimity on this matter) somewhat divergent in their politics.26 Grenville published a reply to Clendinnen’s “The History Question” in a subsequent Quarterly Essay, but otherwise the chief respondents to the issues raised by McKenna and Hirst were independent broadsheet literary reviewers, Jane Sullivan and Stella Clarke.27 In his Australian Financial Review essay, “Writing the Past,” McKenna had levelled particular criticism at one of Clarke’s opinion pieces about the merits of fiction over history in providing engaging access to the past. At this point it is useful to backtrack, to consider the contrast between the early reception of The Secret River, from mid-2005, and what occurred after Mark McKenna’s essay in December of that year. Stella Clarke had set the tone with her highly enthusiastic review of the novel in the Australian on 25 June 2005. Commenting that, despite considerable critical praise, Grenville’s was not yet a household name, Clarke believed that “the real novelty and wallop of [The Secret River] lies in her revelation of the sweet and terrible pull of land on the heart of her plebeian, dispossessed Englishman.”28 In a feature essay published in the following week’s The Age, “Skeletons out of the Closet,” Jane Sullivan entertained eager expectations of Grenville’s book opening a fresh front in the history wars. Indeed, Sullivan had sought out Keith Windschuttle for his opinion of the book. Disappointingly, perhaps, Windschuttle’s response was complacently dismissive of the book’s importance rather than strident or polemical: 26

Tom Griffiths’s essay (see fn 3 above) was a late though fairly glancing contribution to the discussion – he used Grenville’s views as a springboard for his presentation of Judith Wright as an historian. 27 See Kate Grenville, “The Question of History: Response,” Quarterly Essay 25 (2007): 66; Jane Sullivan, “Skeletons Out of the Closet,” The Age (2 July 2005), Review: 1–2; and Stella Clarke, “A Challenging Look at the Familiar Territory of Old Australia,” Weekend Australian (25–26 June 2005), Review: 8–9. 28 Clarke, “A Challenging Look at the Familiar Territory of Old Australia.”

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I think the topic itself sounds strange. The issue has gone beyond a case where a fictionalised account is going to make any impact. Those people who now believe the story of guns and violence against Aborigines will be comforted by a book like that. Not one mind will be changed.29

So no big outcry against the book would come from Windschuttle. Furthermore, asking in her article what historians think of “fiction writers who dare to tackle these themes,” Sullivan quoted Inga Clendinnen’s first impression of The Secret River. This, it should be remembered, was published some months before McKenna’s essay: Inga Clendinnen […] has read The Secret River and finds it “a sympathetic reconstruction of the extremity of the situation of these individuals.” She thinks Kate Grenville is doing what good historians do: “to imaginatively create the plausible circumstances of what it was to be a convict becoming a settler.” The historian in her gets pernickety about the novelist’s licence with detail, but she understands that is a legitimate tool of fiction. “It’s the enterprise I think that is good. I would like to think it will extinguish the history wars, to a degree.”30

This barely warns of much stronger criticism Clendinnen would level in “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?,” a Quarterly Essay published some months after the media comments of both Hirst and McKenna and partly occasioned by remarks by then Prime Minister John Howard about the teaching of Australian history in schools. This suggests that, at first, Clendinnen was either not as perturbed about Grenville’s book as she would later become, or was unwilling at the time to air her concerns in the media. In Clendinnen’s Quarterly Essay, Grenville’s book and interview comments serve to exemplify wider concerns about the cultural status and role of history and about threats to its integrity as a discipline. It is plain that even though Clendinnen’s criticisms of Grenville are softened by various concessions, her essay is at least partly interested in reclaiming public intellectual authority for historians. Both McKenna and Clendinnen show their acute awareness that they could be dismissed as merely exhibiting rivalry with Grenville. In “Writing the Past,” McKenna takes care not simply to air con-

29 30

Sullivan, “Skeletons Out of the Closet.” “Skeletons Out of the Closet.”

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cerns but to balance his admitted animosity – he confesses to having been provoked by Grenville’s “ladder” remarks – with considerations about how media comments on the role of the literary may have created a climate for Grenville’s views. He notes that one consequence of the history wars may have been to foster public perceptions that there was no agreement among professional historians – and that the vacuum this produced, and the hype generated by literary critics in the media, may have “encouraged” novelists such as Grenville to “parade as historical authorities in the public domain.”31 Stella Clarke’s riposte to Mark McKenna must have heaped fuel on this debate. Clarke offered an analogy between the claims made by historians and colonization itself. She characterized in highly sarcastic terms McKenna’s claim about the role of literary critics like herself who had been “pumping up Australia’s top historical novelists, leading them to think it’s fine to colonize territory traditionally owned by professional historians, on the basis that it is a terra nullius of truth.”32 Clarke touched a raw nerve in suggesting that this relatively minor skirmish had occurred because of Kate Grenville’s unwitting taking-up of historical resources that had been left lying around. If Grenville’s incursion into the territory of historians was blind, then was it partly wilfully so, especially given the aggravated public debate about Australian history? And was it this that landed her in strife? Even so, this was the kind of strife that also served the interests of its chief participants, creating a public stir and generating publicity and attention. This is not to suggest that such interests were uppermost in the minds of the antagonists, or that their motives were not high-minded and professional. These factors are inseparable from the formation of public intellectual careers, the regeneration of national discourse, and, as I suggest here and elsewhere, the renewal of readerships for literary and other quality works.33 The notion of ‘taking-up’ is multiply resonant in this context. In Searching for The Secret River (2006), the non-fictional companion to the novel which 31

McKenna, “Writing the Past,” Australian Financial Review (16 December 2005), Review: 1–2, 8. 32 Stella Clarke, “Havoc in History House,” Weekend Australian (4–5 March 2006), Review: 8–9. McKenna’s response to Clarke’s response was published two weeks later: “Comfort History,” Weekend Australian (18–19 March 2006), Review: 15. 33 I have presented this argument in more detail in my book Literary Activists: Writer–Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009).

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documents the research and writing process, Grenville describes a light-bulb moment in her exchange with the Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko, one that has since been singled out by several commentators as ethically central to the novel and its author’s account.34 Lucashenko prompts Grenville to rethink her casual use of a phrase from her own family’s oral history about her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman: her family used to talk about how Wiseman had taken up land on the Hawkesbury River. Grenville learns from her exchange with Lucashenko that the innocent sounding ‘taking up’ functions euphemistically to erase Aboriginal prior ownership of the land, and that the bare word ‘taking’ more precisely denotes what happened on the frontier, when land was forcibly appropriated from its Aboriginal owners. Reading The Secret River, and this debate, alongside Searching for The Secret River highlights the deliberate way in which Grenville’s novel had repackaged revisionist historical accounts of that racist ‘terra nullius’ mind-set – the mind-set that allowed colonists to dismiss and discount, or be blind to, evidence of Aboriginal ownership of land. In projecting the interiority of Thornhill in his encounter with Aboriginal Others, however, Grenville also, crucially, picks up on contemporary anthropological understandings of the rootedness of social attitudes to property, possession, cultivation, and land ownership in the very identity, personhood, and social being of this one representative British colonist. Certainly, as Hirst suggests, the attribution of advanced intuitions about Aboriginal farming practices to the barely literate William Thornhill undermines the putative historical accuracy of The Secret River. Yet it precisely translates and synthesizes into imaginative fictional material the fruits of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural understandings, refined in fields of anthropology and history and through years of cross-cultural exchange with Aboriginal Australians themselves. As a teacher of Australian studies, I have sometimes considered that I could do worse than present my students with a book like The Secret River as one way, among others, of en-

34

See Kate Grenville, Searching for The Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006): 28– 29. Adam Gall, for instance, regards Grenville’s account of this exchange with Lucashenko as pivotal to The Secret River, and his reading identifies both strengths and ambiguities in Grenville’s negotiation of white settler–colonial possession. Gall is somewhat critical of some of Clendinnen’s commentary on Grenville’s novel. Gall, “Taking / Taking Up: Recognition and the Frontier in Grenville’s The Secret River,” J A S A L (Special Issue “The Colonial Present: Australian Writing for the Twenty-First Century,” 2008): 94–104.

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gaging them imaginatively – not so much with an actual past as with broader conceptual issues about themselves as citizens within a settler-colonial nation. The fact that historians have adopted some of the tools of fiction (analogy, story, personal voice, imaginative organization of materials) suggests the power fiction has, albeit in promiscuous and strangely digested forms, to repackage, recycle, and deliver information to readers, and to promote their sympathetic engagement. Indeed, it may be anthropologists rather than historians whose knowledges inform The Secret River’s deeper perceptions. As suggested above, these have to do with our sense of ownership and possession, and with how the whole weight of society may condition individual longings. In Thornhill, the ‘good settler’ as Everyman, we (white Australians) see ourselves mirrored: we see the powerful motivation of self interest, the conveniences of decision-making, the sense of limited room for individual mobility within a crowded, competitive society, the belief in oneself as ‘good’, ‘kind’ or ‘decent’ in the teeth of one’s less than ideal choices. As Kossew observes, The Secret River owes much to the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner’s famous Boyer Lecture on the “great Australian silence.”35 One could say that so do historians. Grenville’s novel has this much in common with contemporary Australian revisionist histories – neither could have been produced without the richly fertile interdisciplinary knowledge-base that, along with Aboriginal land-rights activism in the 1970s, gave impetus to and informed rewritings of the frontier. What my discussion suggests, therefore, is that to assume the role of ‘public intellectual’ carries benefits for a literary career in twenty-first-century Australia, and that this has an impact well beyond the career of an individual writer. Grenville’s career, and her intervention in Australia’s ‘history wars’ with the publication of The Secret River, shows that a writer’s public intellectual engagement, even when sincerely motivated, may tap into discourses of national relevance. Such discourses are highly professionally and institutionally guarded, not only conferring legitimacy and credibility, but also offering public value to scholars and their research careers. Indeed, the present collection of essays about Grenville exemplifies the tightness with which literary reception and public intellectual status can be coupled in Australia. When writers like Grenville intervene in national debates, this can effect the welding-together of disparate readerships and it can expand literary constituencies. Indeed, literary works are themselves public interventions. The controversies 35

Kossew, “Voicing the ‘Great Australian Silence’,” 8–9.

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Kate Grenville as Public Intellectual

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they generate can reach both the literary academy, with its professional interests in postcolonial and national debates, and a broader, educated mass of readers attuned to national cultural debates in the quality mediasphere.

Postscript: The Lieutenant (2008) Grenville’s novel The Lieutenant was published after the elaboration of this essay’s argument. This latest novel, again addressing the meaning of the early colonial encounter as the genesis-point of contemporary Australian debates about nation, consolidates the orientation of Grenville’s fiction to nation, confirming the above argument. Indeed, if we consider The Lieutenant in the light of those earlier allegations against The Secret River by Hirst, Clendinnen, and others, we can see yet again the unmistakable signs of Grenville’s flexibility, adaptiveness, and quiet perseverance as a literary writer – as a writer prepared to surrender neither her claim to public intellectual authority nor her effort to parlay the meanings of history within the present. In an interview with Susan Mansfield about The Lieutenant, Grenville reflects once more on the Secret River controversy. She continues to insist upon her right to use historical resources for a work of imaginative fiction: From Homer onwards, people have been writing historical fiction. To me, anything that illuminates what it is to be human is a worthwhile endeavour. History is one way of doing that, fiction is another.36

Yet Mansfield presses Grenville on her inclusion in The Lieutenant of Captain Silk, an historian who plans to write a bestselling history. Though friendly with Silk, Grenville’s protagonist Daniel Rooke is quietly uneasy. Thus the two characters’ interaction serves as wry commentary on the fiction–history stoush. Yet Grenville herself prefers to direct attention to what this suggests about her interest in historiography, in the question of “how we arrive at our idea of what has happened in the past.” Nevertheless, Grenville structures The Lieutenant in a way that appears to renegotiate the balance between the resources of fiction and history, more clearly marking out the divide. In so doing, she perhaps reveals a newly sharpened set of sensitivities. In contrast with The Secret River, The Lieu-

36

Susan Mansfield, “Author Interview: Kate Grenville – Tales of a new-found land,” Scotsman (21 February 2009): 14, http://living.scotsman.com/books/AuthorInterview-Kate-Grenville-.4996736.jp (accessed 29 October 2010).

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tenant is much more intimately, even boldly, based on actual historical men and women. It is plotted very closely against the archives – indeed, written to include recorded dialogue as authentically as possible. Hovering so close to the record, Grenville also takes pains to make a distinct and observable parting of the ways with that record. She accords clear and bounded definition to the story as imaginative fiction by giving her protagonists, along with some of the key historical figures (for example, Governor Phillip), different names. Meanwhile, all the paratext in her book points back to those actual historical figures, places, and events. From a reader’s perspective, this strategy sets up a doubling or ghosting of realities: the fictional reality thus parallels and mirrors, without ever supplanting (as may arguably have been the case in parts of The Secret River), the historical record to which it refers. The choice to retain some actual, historical names for things and places (for example, the Sirius and Sydney Cove) alongside these fictional names for people seems purposeful. Grenville thus seeks to maintain a slender and subtle yet visible thread weaving through and between fiction and history. In The Secret River, Grenville had chosen, in William Thornhill, a male protagonist whose response to and moral dilemmas about the Indigenous /non-Indigenous encounter yielded the central drama of the novel. So, too, is the case with Daniel Rooke, her protagonist in The Lieutenant. Yet this character, based on William Dawes, is an educated man, at odds with prevailing attitudes among the colonists, and a man whose proto-liberal sensibility (as his very notebooks testify) anticipate, it would seem, the views of many present-day Australian readers. Hirst would perhaps be unable to sustain here his earlier criticisms: for here, in a subject like Dawes – writer, thinker, scientist, and product of British enlightenment – the leap across the divide, from past to present sensibilities, from historical subject to contemporary Australian readers, may not seem so great.

WORKS CITED Ackland, Michael. “Kate Grenville,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 325: Australian Writers, 1975–2000 (Detroit M I : Gale Research, 2006): 128–34. Anderson, Don. “You’ve Met Joan – Our Everywoman,” Sydney Morning Herald (30 April 1988), Spectrum: 70. Carter, David. “Public Intellectuals, Book Culture and Civil Society,” Australian Humanities Review (December 2001), http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org /archive/Issue-December-2001/carter2.html

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Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters, tr. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2004). Clarke, Stella. “A Challenging Look at the Familiar Territory of Old Australia,” Weekend Australian (25–26 June 2005), Review: 8–9. ——. “Havoc in History House,” Weekend Australian (4–5 March, 2006), Review: 8–9. Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (October 2006): 2–72. Condon, Matt. “A Great Idea,” Sun Herald (29 July 2001), Sunday Life: 30. Craven, Peter. “Albion’s Story,” The Age (23 July 1994), Saturday Extra: 7. Gall, Adam. “Taking/Taking Up: Recognition and the Frontier in Grenville’s The Secret River,” J A S A L (Special Issue “The Colonial Present: Australian Writing for the Twenty-First Century,” 2008): 94–104. Gelder, Ken, & Paul Salzman. The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–1988 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989). Grenville, Kate. Bearded Ladies (St Lucia, Queensland: U of Queensland P, 1984). ——. Dark Places (Sydney: Macmillan, 1994). ——. Dreamhouse (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1984). ——. The Idea of Perfection (Sydney: Picador, 2000). ——. Joan Makes History (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988). ——. The Lieutenant (Melbourne: Text, 2008). ——. Lilian’s Story (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985). ——. “The Question of History: Response,” Quarterly Essay 25 (February 2007): 66–72. ——. “Saying the Unsayable,” First Thea Astley Memorial Lecture, in Making Waves: 10 Years of the Byron Bay Writers Festival, ed. Marele Day, Susan Bradley Smith & Fay Knight (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2006). ——. Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006). ——. The Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2005). Griffiths, Tom. “Truth and Fiction: Judith Wright as Historian,” Australian Book Review 283 (August 2006): 25–30. Hirst, John. Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2005). Indyk, Ivor. “Lilian’s Graceless Encore,” Weekend Australian (9–10 July 1994), Review: 7. Kossew, Sue. “Voicing the ‘Great Australian Silence’: Kate Grenville’s Narrative of Settlement in The Secret River,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42.2 (2007): 7–18. Koval, Ramona. Interview with Mark Davis, “A B C Radio National Book Show” (14 April 2008), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2214430.htm (accessed 30 April 2008).

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Mackay, Hugh. Advance Australia … Where? How We’ve Changed, Why We’ve Changed, and What Will Happen Next? (Sydney: Hachette Livre Australia, 2007). McKenna, Mark. “Comfort History,” Weekend Australian (18–19 March 2006), Review: 15. ——. “Writing the Past,” Australian Financial Review (16 December 2005), Review 1–2, 8. McPhee, Hilary. Other People’s Words (Sydney: Pan Macmillan / Picador, 2001). Mansfield, Susan. “Author Interview: Kate Grenville – Tales of a new-found land,” Scotsman (21 February 2009): 14, http://living.scotsman.com/books/AuthorInterview-Kate-Grenville-.4996736.jp (accessed 29 October 2010). Martin, Susan K. “The Wood From the Trees: Taxonomy and the Eucalypt as the New National Hero in Recent Australian Writing,” J A S A L 3 (2004): 81–94. Nile, Richard. “The Conceits of Silence,” Australian, Richard Nile Blog (16 April 2008), http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/richardnile/index.php/theaustralian /comments/the_conceits_of_silence/ (accessed 30 April 2008). Rooney, Brigid. Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009). ——. “The Sinner, the Prophet, and the Pietà: Sacrifice and the Sacred in Helen Garner’s Narratives,” Antipodes 19.2 (2005): 159–65. Stanner, W.E.H. After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians: An Anthropologist’s View (1968 Boyer Lecture; Sydney: A B C , 1969). Sullivan, Jane. “Skeletons Out of the Closet,” The Age (2 July 2005), Review: 1–2. Visontay, Michael. “Australia’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Sydney Morning Herald (12 March 2005): 9.

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Author, Author! The Two Faces of Kate Grenville

—— E LIZABETH M C M AHON

A

Kate Grenville has produced a considerable body of work on the craft of writing. Indeed, she is undoubtedly Australia’s most prominent author of writing books. These include The Writing Book: A Manual for Fiction Writers (1990); Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written (1993), with Sue Woolfe; Writing from Start to Finish: A Six-Step Guide (2001); and Searching for the Secret River (2006). She has also contributed to anthologies on Australian writing and has given numerous interviews that focus on her writing practice and herself as a writing subject. This work on processes, methods, and the experience of writing forms an object of study in itself. It is also in direct dialogue with the completed objects of this labour: namely, her published fiction. The relationship between these two strands of her work is mutually constitutive, for her success as a fiction writer authorizes her books on writing by providing evidence of the success of her methods. The converse trajectory, reading the novels in the light of the writing manuals, constructs a riskier perspective for both the writer and her work, for the exposition of method may diminish the illusion of the novel’s organic narrative, which is part of the realist mode Grenville deploys, though by no means exclusively. Key narrative elements such as voice and perspective and the plotting of temporality may be more readily identified and dissected when the mode of their construction is laid bare. At its most extreme, the novel may appear to fulfil the dicta of known processes; indeed, such a criticism has made of her 2000 novel The Idea of Perfection.1

1

LONGSIDE HER FICTIONAL OEUVRE,

Jennifer Livett, “Nobody’s Perfect,” Island 82 (Autumn 2000): 29–32.

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This essay examines Grenville’s work on the craft of writing as an influential body of work in its own right and as it interacts with Grenville’s fiction and the figure of Grenville as author. The essay will then examine some key points where these domains collide to identify both the generosity and the risks of this dual project. A key question underpinning this analysis concerns the relative successes of the writing books. As Susan Wyndham has also pondered in the Sydney Morning Herald, how can we account for the relative lack of interest in Grenville’s most recent book on writing method, Searching for the Secret River (2006)? Wyndham writes: Only the Herald, the The Age and The Australian reviewed the book, a fascinating memoir of how she researched the novel and moulded it from nonfiction into fiction. It has not yet been – as it should be – used in writing or literature courses. Sales are heading for a modest 5000.2

She quotes Grenville as suggesting that this may be due to a “category difficulty.” Grenville adds: “Is it a how-to-write book or is it memoir? When I try to explain it, people look puzzled until I tell them to think of it as the bonus D V D , and at that point their faces clear.” Given the unqualified success of her earlier writing books and her rise in international prominence and acclaim as a novelist, the fate of this more recent offering presents a point of vulnerability in this series of achievements. This essay speculates that the reason for this resistance on the part of her wide and appreciative readership concerns the problem of reflexivity between these two domains of Grenville’s writing. To unpack this proposition, the essay will contextualize Grenville’s books on writing in the light of the burgeoning discipline of creative writing in schools and universities in order to show how Grenville’s method articulates with changing ideas of how creative writing can be taught and assessed and, increasingly, valued as a legitimate activity for research institutions. Importantly, as this essay will show, Grenville herself embodies this process and her writing books have been key texts in curricula. A related issue of embodiment and writing for Grenville and her work is her emphasis on the craft of writing as a feminist praxis, which variously harnesses and challenges the conventional patterns of women’s everyday lives. Here again we can trace a reflexive relation between the project of the novels and Grenville’s account of her own life as a writer, daughter, mother, and wife. Finally, the essay will consider the 2

Susan Wyndham, “Mystery of the River,” Sydney Morning Herald (20 January

2007), Spectrum: 30.

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relationship between these reflexive bodies of work when Grenville shifts focus from writing fiction to writing historical fiction. In this overlay of the personal, the national, and the historical, what has been an enabling reflexivity of author and work breaks down or breaks open to reveal their profound misalignment; indeed, alignment itself does not produce coherence. The story of creative writing’s institutionalization has been the subject of numerous studies in recent times, with Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities (2005) providing a thorough and perceptive account of this history and debates.3 Creative writing programmes, which began in the U S A but are now established in most major universities in the U K , Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, have had a vexed relationship with more conventional literary studies.4 There remain a significant number of academics in literary studies who are sceptical about the role of creative writing and what they perceive to be its anti-intellectualism and its promotion of indulgent outpourings. In Australia, the University of Technology (U T S ) in Sydney was at the vanguard of introducing writing courses in the 1980s, and many of its graduates have gone on to become successful writers. Other writing programmes are increasingly espousing this criterion of success, which, more than conventional university courses, is enlisted to promote an institution’s overall cachet. Indeed, the customary demarcation line between ‘creative’ M F A degrees and ‘academic/research-based’ doctoral programmes is nowadays often crossed.5 The last five years have seen a new twist in this development, with many established writers returning to the academy to complete doctorates in creative arts because of the dearth of alternative funding for writers, and because their skills are now in demand for undergraduate and postgraduate 3

Paul Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities (London: Routledge,

2005). For statistics on the dramatic increase in creative writing courses in the U S A from the 1980s to the present, see also Marjorie Perloff, “ ‘ Creative Writing’ Among the Disciplines,” M L A Newsletter 38.1 (2006): 3. 4

See Peta Mitchell’s review of Dawson, which includes a useful summary of these debates: “Negotiating the Creative and the Critical: Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities,” Australian Humanities Review (September 2006): 39–40, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/mitchell .html 5 The 2008 winner of the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award (Australia’s most lucrative literary prize of $100,000,000), Steven Conte, developed the manuscript of his successful and first novel, The Zookeeper’s War, for his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

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teaching, though these are very often on terms of casual employment. However, the recent practice of appointing well-known writers to the highest grades of the academic scale has also created resentment at the implementation of an alternative and incommensurate system of staff recruitment and promotion with different expectations of institutional duties. One of the key contradictions in the rise of creative writing in the academy is the perceived absence of moderation in its relationship to the sacrosanct object of desire, literature. By many, creative writing has been seen as too uncritical in its approach to literature.6 This view is explained in part by the way in which creative writing often conceives of a particular temporal sequentiality, in which the creative activity of writing precedes, and takes precedence over, the analytical process of assessment and judgment. Such a disjunction between ‘practice’ and ‘theory’ can, as it were, self-authorize or autonomize the creative product and assign to critical processes a subordinate and even extraneous status. It is this aspect of writing programmes that also threatens the borderline between the academy and other institutions of education such as community colleges, where creative writing courses have also flourished. Grenville has commented on this institutional anxiety directly when comparing the status of creative writing in the U S A with that in Australia: There is no belief in Creative Writing [in Australia]. Even the term is sneered at. Creative Writing is considered the kind of thing that you do at W E A along with macramé and pottery.7

Yet, if it has been understood as too uncritical and hobbyist for the academy, it has also offered an implicit critique of the mystical, sacrosanct work of art, the very cornerstone of literary studies, by its focus on process and technique rather than on, say, the fully-formed or achieved image or narrative. Creative writing has foregrounded the labour and the craft of literary production and has brought those processes into the collective context of the seminar or workshop. The figure of the lone and isolated artistic genius is thereby not only questioned but replaced by something like that of the more or less gifted artisan. 6

See Perloff, “ ‘ Creative Writing’ Among the Disciplines,” and Mitchell “Negotiating the Creative and the Critical,” which discusses Marjorie Perloff’s position. 7 Gerry Turcotte, “The Story-Teller’s Revenge: Kate Grenville Interviewed by Gerry Turcotte,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994): 148. W E A is an acronym for the Workers Education Association.

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From the perspective of the present, when creative writing has been ensconced in the Australian academy for over two decades, some of these criticisms and anxieties are put in relief and perspective. We might recognize in the fear of ‘indulgence’, for instance, a related fear of affect and its place in academic study. More recent academic studies on affect have given the realm of emotion a new respectability and have challenged the very notion of a purely intellectual process.8 Feminist studies in particular have focused attention on the embodied nature of knowledge, its material, visceral, and affective dimensions.9 It is now largely accepted that thought and creative processes involve a complex relation of body, emotion, and intellect, even if the role and placement of that creativity remains (properly) contested. Another key shift in perspective is the ways in which creative writing’s focus on technique, its understanding of writing as a craft, is in fact very much in touch with some of the most arcane and intellectual writing experiments that came to define postmodernism, in line with the linguistic turn.10 Derrida’s essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1972), one of the foundational texts of poststructuralism and indicative of the linguistic turn, recalibrates the less elevated status of writing relative to the ‘Truth’ assigned to speech according to the assumption of its greater immediacy. His essay not only posits but also enacts the impossibility of divorcing perceptions of bodily utterance (speech) from learned conventionalities (writing).11 Novelists and poets have made similar claims, and often, as in the case of Derrida, this has not promoted a more ‘natural’ conception of writing – writing as spontaneous expression – but one that celebrates and exploits its long traditions of artifice.12 8

See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2003), and Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2004). 9 See Elizabeth Wilson’s work on this topic, including “Gut Feminism,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15.3 (2004): 66–94, and “ ‘ Can you think what I feel? Can you feel what I think?’ Notes on Affect, Embodiment, and Intersubjectivity in A I ,” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 2.2 (2005), http://www.scan.net.au 10 The defining text of this move, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. Richard Rorty (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1992), was first published in 1967. 11 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” tr. Barbara Johnson, Dissemination (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1983): 61–156. 12 One famous example is the avant-garde movement Oulipo, which advocated the use of productive constraints, a strategy most notorioussly deployed in Georges

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Grenville’s relationship to this intellectual and experimental domain reveals much about her particular priorities, politics, and commitments. Fundamentally, she believes that writing can be taught as a craft and that the notion of spontaneous expression is disabling for authorship. She also believes strongly that the academy is an appropriate place for teaching creative writing. In relation to the overturning of conventions around writing and meaning from the late 1960s, she describes, in her interview with Gerry Turcotte, the revelation of discovering the less conventional fiction of the U S A , where experimental writing was valued in ways she had not experienced in Australia. She records how she found an enabling freedom and boldness in this more experimental work.13 However, there are also points of significant difference in Grenville’s approach within this framework. The most immediate of these is the far more populist style and pitch of her writing. Her first writing book, The Writing Book: A Manual for Fiction Writers, was published in 1990 at the time when writing courses were first established in Australian universities but it is explicitly addressed to the general reader, thereby blurring the lines between the readership on either side of the academy’s walls. In its emphasis on technique over content, Grenville’s approach resembles that of academic creative writers informed by the avant-garde, such as Hazel Smith and Kevin Brophy.14 However, Grenville’s book does not conform to scholarly practices such as citation, and personalizes intellectual positions. Thus, where Brophy may write on the relationship between writing, psychoanalysis, and surrealism, Grenville opens The Writing Book with a statement of personal belief: One of the basic philosophies behind the book is that our minds are capable of much more that we usually think […] a lot of our minds’ other capabilities aren’t called on so often: the instinctive, intuitive ways of thinking that have nothing to do with logic.15

Perec’s use of the lipogram (missing letter) in A Void (1969) – a novel composed without use of the letter ‘e’. 13 Gerry Turcotte, “The Story-Teller’s Revenge,” 148–49. 14 Hazel Smith, The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing (Crows Nest, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2005); Kevin Brophy, Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 1998); Kevin Brophy, Explorations in Creative Writing (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2003). 15 Kate Grenville, The Writing Book: A Manual for Fiction Writers (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990): xi. Further page references are in the main text.

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This philosophy is fundamental to psychoanalysis and Freud’s theory of the unconscious and dream-work. It also informs discourses such as poststructuralism that draw on psychoanalysis and countless avant-garde art movements. Grenville’s method is non-citational and easily accessible; she embodies these ideas in and of herself. Of course, this is part of the strength and appeal of her book, and, as I will suggest later, is an approach that returns as an important issue in the most recent of her writing books, Searching for the Secret River, where matters of contested historical scholarship are at stake and personal embodiment may be inadequate as an authorization for writing. Grenville’s commitment to a less hieratic conception of art also distances her from other experimental writing projects. Her emphatic promotion of artistic production as an embedded aspect of everyday life relates directly to the modernist project of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, but her own conception of everyday life is distinctive within this concern – she is, namely, not afraid to identify with the amateur writer, the teacher, and the school student, narrowing the distance between these categories and that of established and successful authors such as herself. The Writing Book sets out to demolish ten tenets of writing that hinder and intimidate potential writers. These are presented as ‘whispering voices’, akin to the “Angel in the House” that Woolf describes in “Professions for Women.”16 Grenville’s list includes: 1. “Just begin at the beginning” 2. “First work out what you want to say” 3. “First know your characters” 4. “Writing should be grammatically correct” 5. “Writing has to have an interesting style” 6. “Writing has to have a strong story” 7. “Write about what you know” 8. “If you can’t write great literature, it’s not worth doing” 9. “You have to be inspired” 10. “You must write without distractions.” (1–4) 16

Grenville refers explicitly to Woolf’s Angel in her essay in Susan Wyndham’s An Eloquent Sufficiency: 50 Writers Talk About Life and Literature Over Lunch (Sydney: Sydney Morning Herald Books, 1998): 118. Woolf writes of this Angel: “It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her.” Woolf, “Professions for Women” (1931), in On the Contrary: Essays by Men and Women, ed. Martha Rainbolt & Janet Fleetwood (Albany: State U of New York P, 1983): 301.

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This list could be organized by issues of temporality, literary merit, and the attendant subjectivity of the imagined ‘proper writer’. Foundational to all of Grenville’s books and essays on writing method is her re-organization of the accepted temporalities of writing. She seeks to overturn prescribed notions of the beginning, the present, and the sequence of writing. For Grenville, this involves clearing away accepted prerequisites for writing – most importantly, the notion that writers already know what they will write and that writing is a process of transcribing preexisting thoughts. She offers in place of these preconceptions the idea that the writing process will itself produce the ideas and the characters. The imagined space of ‘pre-writing’ is thereby replaced by the present of spontaneous writing, which is somewhat similar to the automatic writing of the surrealists, though in Grenville’s schema the product of this process is raw material rather than an occult or mystical text. Furthermore, for Grenville, this beginning point is multiple and various, which is to say that the writer returns to this process repeatedly even when midway through a work. For this reason, she states that writers may begin with whatever fragments they have to hand: ideas, phrases, memories. The relocation of this material to the present moment releases it from preconceived arrangements into the creative flow of writing. These foundational tenets are strongly connected to modernist aesthetics of method and process, most notably enacted and theorized by Gertrude Stein, who wrote prolifically on the process of writing, including a writing book that promises to offer direction, How to Write (1927–31), but which, true to her character, is somewhat less expository than most.17 But here, as elsewhere, Stein directs the writer and the reader to the time of composition, the creative moment of process, as the goal of writing. For Stein, as for Woolf, and for their successors, this temporality is contradictory, in that it is marked by its difference, its achievement of an endlessly creative moment, which stands in relief against the multitudinous moments of everyday inattention. However, it is also a moment woven into the everyday, particularly the habits and repetitions of everyday life. This emphasis on process and on writing as an aspect of everyday life is also the determined message of The Writing Book and of Grenville’s numerous other discussions of writing. In Susan Wyndham’s 1998 collection of author interviews, An Eloquent Sufficiency, Grenville writes:

17

Gertrude Stein, How to Write (1931; Mineola N Y : Dover, 1975).

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the very best bit [about writing] is standing in the shower in the morning with the steam rising up around you and in the mist your book takes shape and it’s perfect. It’s wise, it’s witty, it’s honest, it’s elegant and naturally it’s going to be a best seller. The very worst bit is when you have to get out of the shower, put your clothes on and actually sit at the desk. That bit is terrible.18

The images and language in this account are telling. The scene of the daily shower is both routine and intimate, and stands as a kind of metonym for Grenville’s method of writing instruction. She lays bare her own self, habits, and routines for the reader. She also literalizes the concept of an embodied writing practice by foregrounding her own body in this euphoric experience of the imagined work. The clothed body then recedes into cultural codification as the labour of writing begins. The lexis and register of the writing enforce this point. Her use of vernacular phrases of valuation – “the very best bit” and “the very worst bit” – also locates the activity of writing in the world of the everyday. Setting the scene in this way, her literary writing is one inflection of the language of her day. Grenville records another more unusual routine of writing in Searching for the Secret River when she describes her mother’s involvement in caring for her two children: When our two children were babies, Mum minded them a couple of days a week so that their father, Bruce, and I could work. They loved going to her place because she truly believed in children playing, in them finding their own play. One day either Alice or Tom got hold of a roll of toilet paper and when I came to pick them up it was everywhere, looped around the backs of chairs, winding in and out of the stair rails, out the window and back again. Mrs Next–Door had visited apparently, and was scandalized. But, Mum told me, “I said to her, what toy could you ever buy that would keep a child so interested?”19

The story proceeds with an account of Grenville leaving the house, with a thermos and sandwiches prepared by her mother, driving to a pleasant spot, and using one of the children’s kickboards as a desk for writing.

18 19

Wyndham, An Eloquent Sufficiency, 117. Kate Grenville, Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006): 15.

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Once again, Grenville locates her writing practice within and beyond the context of the everyday. The toilet-roll incident, amusing in itself, serves as an overdetermined figure of the bodily, the democratic, and the chaos of everyday life. Grenville’s writing practice is thus presented as both continuous with, and a break from, this bodily, democratic, and chaotic context. The competing impression of this account, alongside the meandering toilet paper, is the contract between the two women to enable Grenville’s writing: her mother’s labour for, and belief in, her daughter; and Grenville’s ingenuity in creating a makeshift office in her car. Moreover, as she goes on to recount, this routine produced its own, distinctive narrative context, as Grenville also recorded her family history from her mother’s stories during these visits. What she foregrounds is both the labour of writing and the labour that enables writing, as did Woolf before her. But where Woolf railed against the sacrifices made by women to facilitate the professions and education of men, Grenville’s numerous accounts of this contract focus on bonds between women. The modernist emphasis on process and the time of writing thereby meets the other modernist discovery of the particular creativity of women’s time. Accordingly, Grenville’s repeated staging of the relation between her writing praxis and her own life as an exemplar of the everyday life of women is presented as a feminist matter in the tradition of Woolf. For, while it pertains to the broader problematic of time in modernist and postmodernist thought, it is the particular repetitions and demands of women’s time, which Woolf and Stein theorized and rehearsed in their own work, that we find in Grenville’s embodied account of writing and subjectivity. Grenville refers to Woolf explicitly in this vein in her interview with Susan Wyndham: I had a husband, a household, two beautiful children and also two goldfish, a cat, two mice and about a million shiny cockroaches down in the kitchen. I would bet any money that Hemingway never had to vacuum Rice Bubbles out of the back of the couch. I’m quite sure Flaubert never had to fish the Batman socks out of the mouse cage. Virginia Woolf came close to it. She said: ‘Every time I took up my pen to write, I found a shadow falling across my page. That shadow was the angel in the house.’ I suspect Virginia Woolf never had to make a birthday cake in the shape of a shark but she was getting close to it.20 20

Wyndham, An Eloquent Sufficiency, 118.

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Grenville’s relationship to her feminist antecedent is clear here, but it is not straightforward. Hemingway and Flaubert are cut off from domesticity and children by dint of their gender, and Woolf can only approach the dilemma because her class and her childlessness limit her understanding. Grenville’s declared affiliation here is the everyday heterosexual woman rather than the literary woman. By her own account, she is a wife, mother, and pet owner who also writes; she is not a writer exclusively, or even foremost. She rejects the model of the artist as an outsider or onlooker and presents in its stead a subject immersed in and connected with teeming life. Importantly for women, she also rejects the model of the necessary choice between career and family. Unlike the long tradition of women whose writing precluded children for a range of reasons (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Miles Franklin), Grenville’s writing subject can negotiate different domains of productivity. For Grenville, this is achieved in part by the de-pathologization of both writing and motherhood. Her writing subject is emphatically ‘normal’. One could respond to her comment about Woolf and cake-making by noting the sexual abuse Woolf suffered as a child, her ambiguous sexuality, and her precarious mental health, none of which were convenient excuses for eschewing the joys of motherhood – not that she needed excuses in any case. But Grenville’s invocation of her here as a writer removed from the levelling experience of hands-on motherhood declares her allegiance to the broader project of 1980s feminism rather than to a hieratic line of literary tradition, of whatever gender. This perception increases her appeal to a broader readership in its invitation to identification along the axes of women’s experience rather than the axes of, say, literary genealogy, which preoccupied Stein and Woolf. It is also a marker of the times and the feminist agenda of the 1980s, which sought to re-imagine the relationship between mind and body – a move so successful that it is now accepted in the mainstream and its origins in feminist thought and practice generally occluded. Grenville’s claim to many and conflicting roles is also in keeping with the times and the ways 1980s feminism sought to grant women permission to be contradictory and various – to contain multitudes – which is a theme of her fiction, of course, but is also embedded in her conception of writing itself. One of the difficulties arising from the feminist project of embodiment and the way it intersects with conventional depictions of women is its implication in the too-easy slip between women’s lives and their writing. I have written elsewhere on the particular expectation of women’s ‘authenticity’: i.e. the

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demand for alignment between women’s private and public lives and between their writing and their lived experience.21 This is especially acute in the celebrity culture of late modernity, where, as P. David Marshall observes, fame “moves readily and easily between the domains of the public and the private for public consumption.”22 This mode of double consumption, which ranges voraciously across the author’s work and life, is itself overdetermined in Grenville’s case. Most immediately, she has constructed a body of work about herself as a writing subject, which sits alongside her fiction. Through the presentation of herself in her domestic and familial contexts, she has provided a private self for consumption. Furthermore, in accordance with the greater expectations for the alignment of women’s private and public roles, she has presented an agreement between the feminism of her novels and the politics of her own life. In this way, the accounts of her writing methods and the role of writing in her life lend authority to her feminist project. Finally, her success as a writer provides evidence for the efficacy of her writing methods. She stands as living proof. The agreement and reflexivity between these two domains is, however, dynamic and mutable. It is not a static relationship, though various aspects may appear crystallized at a given time. This is clear from the way Grenville deploys the repetition and self-citation in the story of her private life as a writer. A survey of the many interviews she has given shows the degree to which her self-presentation is a well-rehearsed, even objective projection of herself.23 It could be argued that the repetition relates to Grenville’s truthfulness; there is one answer to a question. And that may be the case. It is also true that the repetition is necessary to consolidate this gendered writing subject. The queer theorist Eve Sedgwick has written of the ambiguity of even the most explicit of ‘coming-out’ statements, for these are just as likely to be misunderstood as more subtle admissions if the listener is disinclined to hear. 21

Elizabeth McMahon, “ ‘ False as Eden’: Constituting the Female Subject in Time,” J A S A L 4 (2005): 173–83. 22 P. David Marshall, “Fame’s Perpetual Moment,” M / C Journal 7.5 (2004): para 21, http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/01-editorial.php (accessed 10 October 2009). 23 See, for example, her 1995 interview with Meg Stewart, which replicates many of the descriptions in the same terms as the 1995 Turcotte interview: “Creative Spirit,” Sydney Morning Herald (23 August 1995): 22.

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That speaker is required to ‘come out’ continuously, as a mode of articulation that may be just as continuously misheard. A similar move is evident in Grenville’s account of her gendered writing practice, which she repeats because she cannot presume it has been heard or understood. The effect produced by this repetition on the level of language use and the narrative structure of anecdotes is to remind us that the Kate Grenville of anecdote, who positions herself as a writer with a husband, children, goldfish, and cockroaches, is a highly stylized subjectivity, a facilitating persona. And where this persona lays bare forms of labour hitherto hidden as inappropriate for a writer, other forms of labour remain concealed in this process. Grenville’s emphasis on the labour of composition but also the (gendered) labour that limits and enables composition, such as child care, cooking, and cleaning, demystifies the economy of literary production and understands the collective energies that enable writing. In Foucauldian terms, Grenville dismantles the ‘author function’ by refusing the category of the lone operator or the Romantic genius. However, she also re-establishes this author function in her successful circulation in contemporary networks of global production, the culture of celebrity authorship and prizes.24 This double movement is also well described in Benjaminian terms, in that, by bringing texts and authors close up and removing their hallowed distance from the everyday reader and writer, Grenville alters what Walter Benjamin described as the distance necessary to maintain the aura of a work of art.25 However, this distance, hence Grenville’s aura, is re-established by the success of her novels, and by concealing aspects of the labour of this success. For, while certain types of labour are repeatedly brought to the fore in Grenville’s account of writing and living in the latetwentieth century, others are occluded, such as the labour of writers’ festivals, publicity events, grant applications, interviews, prize ceremonies – the labour of authorship in late modernity. The networks that enable authorship extend well beyond the familial contracts. In this economy, the movement between the ‘hallowed’ and the quotidian author constructs its own cycle of productivity and consumption.

24

Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” tr. Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1977): 124–27. 25 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968): 219–53. See especially Section I I I (224–25).

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It is these issues of alignment and flux between Grenville’s authorial roles that lie at the heart of the controversy surrounding The Secret River and Searching for the Secret River. A good deal has already been written on the problematic treatment of history in these books. The particular perspective of the present essay, examining the role and characteristics of Grenville’s texts on writing, has, it is hoped, brought this other dilemma into focus. Searching for the Secret River is based on the exegetical component of Grenville’s creative-arts doctoral dissertation, completed at U T S . Taken together, The Writing Book and Searching for the Secret River represent two ends of the creative process. The former focuses on techniques, particularly those required to start writing, and deliberately eschews discussion of theme or content. The latter is analytical, poring over a work in the mode of metacriticism to establish connections between writing method and the fictional subject. In Searching for the Secret River, Grenville deploys many of the strategies of explanation she uses so successfully elsewhere, in particular the personalization of abstract ideas and the alignment of the two Kate Grenvilles: the author of the novel and the Australian woman who is an author at a particular juncture in Australian history. Both of these strategies are radically recast when the context changes from the discussion of writing processes in which content is a secondary concern, as with the The Writing Book, to one which foregrounds the negotiation of contested, volatile content. The pattern of self-alignment, which Grenville has established in the ongoing conversation between her fiction and her writings on process and authorship, proves an inadequate model of concord in this case. The self-agreement is self-cancelling in this instance rather than selfauthorizing. The mode of the writers’ journal or memoir, which remains a controversial component of creative-writing theses in the academy, may not be able to meet the subject of Australian history. This essay has indicated the ways in which Grenville’s career has articulated so neatly with other developments of her time: educational, social, and political. Searching for the Secret River is no less of its time, in that it flies to the heart of Australia’s most necessary self-critique. So, too, the need for self-alignment can be a matter of compulsive control or integrity. Searching for the Secret River is an object lesson in how perilously close these matters of identity may be, in the hall of mirrors that is authorship today.

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WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2004). Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968): 219–53. Brophy, Kevin. Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 1998). ——. Explorations in Creative Writing (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2003). Dawson, Paul. Creative Writing and the New Humanities (London: Routledge, 2005). Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1983): 61–156. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” tr. Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1977): 124–27. Grenville, Kate. Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006). ——. “Self-Portrait,” Australian Book Review 87 (December–January 1987): 17–18. ——. The Writing Book: A Manual for Fiction Writers (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990). ——. Writing from Start to Finish: A Six-Step Guide (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001). ——, & Sue Woolfe. Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993). Livett, Jennifer. “Nobody’s Perfect,” Island 82 (Autumn 2000): 29–32. Marshall, P. David. “Fame’s Perpetual Moment,” M / C Journal 7.5 (2004): para 21, http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/01-editorial.php (accessed 10 October 2009). McMahon, Elizabeth. “‘False as Eden’: Constituting the Female Subject in Time,” J A S A L 4 (2005): 173–83. Mitchell, Peta. “Negotiating the Creative and the Critical: Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities,” Australian Humanities Review September (2006): 39–40, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September2006/mitchell.html Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Creative Writing’ Among the Disciplines,” M L A Newsletter 38.1 (2006): 3–4. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2003). Stein, Gertrude. How to Write (1931; Mineola N Y : 1975). Rorty, Richard, ed. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1992). Smith, Hazel. The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing (Crows Nest, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2005). Stewart, Meg. “Creative Spirit,” Sydney Morning Herald (23 August 1995): 22.

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Turcotte, Gerry. “The Story-Teller’s Revenge: Kate Grenville Interviewed by Gerry Turcotte,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994): 147–58. Wilson, Elizabeth. “‘Can you think what I feel? Can you feel what I think?’ Notes on Affect, Embodiment, and Intersubjectivity in A I ,” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 2.2 (2005), http://www.scan.net.au ——. “Gut Feminism,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15.3 (2004): 66–94. Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women” (1931), in On The Contrary: Essays by Men and Women, ed. Martha Rainbolt & Janet Fleetwood (Albany: State U of New York P, 1983): 301–304. Wyndham, Susan. An Eloquent Sufficiency: 50 Writers Talk About Life and Literature Over Lunch (Sydney: Sydney Morning Herald Books, 1998). ——. “Mystery of the River,” Sydney Morning Herald (20 January 2007): Spectrum 30.

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Madness and Power Lilian’s Story and the Decolonized Body

—— B ILL A SHCROFT

M

O S T P E O P L E B E L I E V E that Lilian’s Story was based on the Sydney eccentric Bea (Beatrice) Miles. But clearly Miles was little more than a stimulus to write the novel, an idea about the possibilities of eccentric individuality, or perhaps an idea about the ways in which individuality can so quickly be represented as eccentricity and even madness. A cheery, unconventional rebel, Lilian is a figure bearing a distant relation to the real-life terror of taxi drivers. Lilian’s Story provides much more than the story of a life. As Grenville says in an interview,

I wasn’t all that interested in the real Bea Miles, but in what she represented to me. As I wrote more and more, she – at least my idea of her – began to embody ideas I’d been vaguely mulling over for quite a while – about how a woman gets to write her own life, rather than have it written for her. How a woman gets to turn her back on all the things women are supposed to want, and another set of priorities. How it feels to be a big loud rude active woman instead of a little meek polite one [. . . ]. Lilian’s Story overlaps with the life of Bea Miles in a few places, but that’s all – it’s not really about her at all.1

Grenville’s comment makes us ponder the extent to which real-life characters, particularly eccentrics like Bea Miles herself, exist more as ideas, ranges of social possibilities, rather than as historical subjects; figures around which myths and legends accumulate. In this respect, Lilian Singer and Bea Miles do 1

Kate Grenville, interviewed by Sue Woolfe in Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, ed. Sue Woolfe & Kate Grenville (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993): 97.

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converge. They converge in that subtle way in which the history and character of an author’s society and culture leak into her book. They converge in the allegorical possibilities constantly proffered by literary language. Lilian’s Story is a book about power, resistance, and freedom. Power is exerted in many forms. It is, first, the power of the group, of the need for acceptance by the group that affects Lilian the girl, a need that drives her to betray those who are as different as she is. This power extends into Lilian’s adolescence when she encounters the full extent of her outsider status. Group conformity is nothing less than the power of social convention itself which Lilian ultimately defeats by becoming a homeless peripatetic ‘character’. More obvious is the power exerted by Albion the Father, who, until we find out more about him in Dark Places (published as Albion’s Story in the U S A ), appears an absurd and blustering caricature whose rage at Lilian’s independence proceeds through various beatings that culminate in her rape while her mother is on holiday. Clearly, this subsequent book on Albion suggests that Grenville was intrigued by the forces that conspired to create such an ogre, although even ‘his’ story fails to turn him into an entirely believable human being. But Lilian’s Story is an account of how power can be appropriated, and is appropriated, by a woman who celebrates her own individuality by accepting her own body and ‘writing’ her own story. This is the power of resistance. If power is defined as the capacity to change the behaviour of others, it is also the capacity to resist the patriarchal power exerted by Albion and the oppressive social convention he embodies. This is not the story of Lilian so much as an account of the way Lilian comes to command her own story, comes to invent the narrative of a life she desires. Written in three parts, “A Girl,” “A Young Lady,” and “A Woman,” the book is a kind of bildungsroman manqué, showing the progress from the desperate desire for acceptance in the girl, through the gradual realization of her difference from the social set, to a full embrace of her individuality and mobility. It is clearly the story of a woman breaking out of the social constrictions on her gender, but it is also a subtle story of cultural transformation, generated by brief but unmistakable connections in the book between the patriarchal and imperial narratives of oppression. The ‘double colonization’ of women in imperialism has been a standard of postcolonial theory since Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford’s book of that name in 1985. Patriarchy and imperialism are mirror images of one another, and women are doubly implicated in them. Although Lilian’s struggle with her appalling Father (the word is always capitalized) is clearly a patriarchal struggle, the

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novel subtly implicates her transformation in a broader cultural and political context. The Father’s name – Albion, the archaic name for Britain – alerts us to the postcolonial implications of the book, for Lilian is born in the year of Federation. This is not to say that the novel is a postcolonial allegory in any simple sense. Lilian’s Story is the story of a woman who discovers the reality and power of her own body and through that discovery learns to write the narrative of her own life rather than live between the lines of the narratives written for her. But the major themes of the novel – power and resistance, the connection between body and self, and the extent to which lives are lived within particular narratives – all coalesce round a central allegorical structure in which Australia’s entrapment in the discourse of Empire, its conventions and its wars, and the slow struggle to live its own history mirror the struggle of the woman. Her acceptance of her body is reflected in an acceptance of Australian place, and her writing her own story, her starring role in her own drama, mirrors a national story struggling to come into being. In this way, with an intermittent but insistent regularity, the patriarchal struggle in which Lilian engages is echoed in a national struggle with Empire. This occurs from the moment of her portentous birth in the year of Australia’s Federation: It was a wild night in the year of Federation that the birth took place. Horses kicked down their stables. Pigs flew, figs grew thorns. The infant mewled and stared and the doctor assured the mother that a caul was a lucky sign. A girl? the father exclaimed, outside in the waiting room, tiled as if for horrible emergencies. This was a contingency he was not prepared for.2

The overbearing bombast of the father contrasts with the hopeless vagueness of the mother, who lets Lilian slip off her breast to the floor. If it is hard to take either the father or the mother seriously, the book, written from the perspective of the child (and, later, the maturing adult), shows how seriously Lilian takes them: Albion was a man of moustaches and shiny boots that squeaked when he walked. His boots on the stairs filled the house, his hand with its powerful black hairs gripped the banister hard enough to make it tremble. (5) 2

Kate Grenville, Lilian’s Story (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1986): 3. Further page references are in the main text.

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Albion embodies the imperial relationship in more than name, but in him it is a sterile narrative, exhausted, imaginatively barren. He is supposedly writing a book, but first he must “gather his material,” which he does by slicing articles out of newspapers (6). Albion is a man marooned in his own useless life obsessed with facts, because, as Dark Places reveals, he has been lost in a story already written for him. He is an emotional cripple and his only way of finding any psychological anchor is through the certainty of facts: The fact of the matter is this, he said. In point of actual fact, the facts are these. I regretted having been sly. Take for a moment the following fact, he demanded, and lifted a finger into the air as if testing the breeze. Consider this fact. (8)

Facts are a reversal of Foucault’s equation of Power/ Knowledge. Albion’s facts are an absurd travesty of knowledge despite the authority they seem to suggest. But this phantom book of Albion’s introduces the theme of narrative in the novel, the various stories within which people live, or are trapped, and the story that Lilian eventually writes for herself. Albion, caught as he is in the sterility of facts, is a man trapped in a patriarchal narrative that determines his prejudices. When Norah gives birth – “My wife looked within herself and saw a living being,” he ponders in Dark Places; “I looked within myself and saw nothing.”3 His revenge is taken out on Lilian: “Women do not need education, Father pronounced regularly over the leg of lamb. Women’s aptitudes lie in other directions” (77–8). There is really no story he can produce, so eventually facts overwhelm him and he has a nervous breakdown (38), which brings a temporary breath of fresh air into the house. The other critical theme in the book is Lilian’s body, which becomes a site of struggle, of alienation, and ultimately a source of her own discovery of language. Very early in her childhood she realizes that she is fat. In the schoolyard this can be a source of some dominance, since she can hold two or three other girls up on the see-saw. But her body is the site of a much more sinister struggle with her father, who gets her to bend over in his study while he beats her. When Albion takes to beating Lilian, he is indulging in a sadistic sexual pleasure, and her bending over, baring her bottom and being whipped, becomes something of a ritual. What he cannot get from the mother, she having retreated into the protection of a delicate constitution, he gets vicariously by beating his daughter. 3

Kate Grenville, Dark Places (London: Picador, 1994): 150.

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The final discovery Lilian makes is the tyranny of society itself, represented by the group of children with whom she tries to gain acceptance but for whom she will always be a mere girl. It was easy to see boys had all the fun, even though timorous John behind glass had little fun. I was the biggest girl as well as the roughest. In the school band I was the only one who had ever played the drums. (25)

The fact that she is not a boy and that her loudness, her bravery, and her roughness can never be anything but strange in a girl is something that dogs her childhood. Lilian’s childhood is a story determined by others. It is a story in which she, like Australia, is out of place, as suggested by her British teacher Miss Vine, who “hated the way birds in Australia laughed at a person from the tops of chimneys, and the way the sun brought the moisture out of a person” (31). Lilian’s desire for acceptance forces her to play by the masculine rules of the game, but she plays a little too hard, and trumpets the fact of her own bravery a little too loudly. The beginning of wisdom and the end of childhood for Lilian are represented by her encounter with another outsider, a neighbour, Miss Gash. Having stolen a tile from her house, Lilian has gained the prestige of a secret in the eyes of her friends. Full of triumph, she refuses to tell: It is my secret, I crowed. Because I am braver than anyone, and know all the dangerous places […] I am an explorer and a hero, I shouted, and I discover things. (45)

Waiting behind the bushes watching Miss Gash for “something to boast about” (53), Lilian begins to learn a lesson about individuality. Miss Gash is more spectacular than she had hoped, because she wears trousers and smokes a pipe. This makes Lilian “huge with secret.” Regarded (inevitably) as a witch by the children, Miss Gash represents to Lilian, almost without her knowing it, a figure of independence revealed not only in her solitary life but also in her body itself: The hair in Miss Gash’s armpits was a tiny head of well-brushed hair. She saw me staring and said, You see, it is cooler this way, and I began to sweat under my clothes. Men are proud of theirs, Miss Gash said and winked at me like an uncle. Hair is supposed to be virile. (64)

But at this stage she is too young to learn the lesson and will betray Miss Gash, who has befriended her. The conflict for Lilian comes when she takes

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the other children to find a tile and must decide between acknowledging Miss Gash and staying with the society of the crowd: If Miss Gash had gone away I would not have had to say anything, but she stood, and took a step closer as if to make sure it was me, and smiled again, and was about to say more, when my mouth opened, and I heard myself shrieking, You’re a silly old loony old maid, you got a face like a prune, go away. (69)

This is the symbolic end of Lilian’s childhood, for it is the story of betrayal, and of shame, which are the introduction to adulthood. But Miss Gash has had an effect on Lilian that will bear fruit, because Lilian’s struggle between social acceptance and independence becomes a struggle to enter her own body.

Reclaiming the Body At the tennis parties to which she is subjected as a ‘young lady’, Lilian was “the fat girl who looked like coconut ice when she blushed […] But I was a person of brains, and still hoped for the best” (73). Ursula, her friend, who “was not a bad person and had the generosity that sometimes goes with being beautiful” (80), offers to advise, but Lilian’s reply is a poignant entry to maturity: “I would be a mediocre pretty girl, I said, and I am too arrogant to be mediocre” (81). A constant refrain for Lilian has been that her difference is easily cast as madness: They say you are loony some of them. The gate between us made her brave, and she leaned over and kissed me quickly on the cheek. But I always tell them you are simply a genius […] I tell them you will go far. (81)

She seems to have opted for the intellect, her body a necessary burden to carry. But it is with the gormless Duncan on the beach that she begins to expand into her own body, into the sense of its presence: I was hungry for each next step, each new shape of skin waiting to be discovered. I was hungry for the grit of sand between our naked skins […] I was a bold girl hungry for everything. I took Duncan’s hand and put it boldly on my breast. (111)

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Lilian’s body, the carapace that she had carried around rather than inhabited, is becoming the flesh of her own new narrative. It is a story that Duncan cannot share; like a gentleman, he refuses to go further, but Lilian, innocent though she is in the matter of sex, finds that her own body can be the space of her experience of the world, perhaps even the space of that wisdom inaccessible in the university. And it is Joan rather than Duncan who will help her to inhabit this corporeal self. Struggling to get Lillian to dive off the boat into the water, Joan announces, “It is a scandal not to be wet.” Lilian’s narrative continues: Joan was as strong and slippery as a hooked fish as she pinned me to the boards of the boat and began ripping at my buttons and hooks. My own bulk held me spreadeagled under her and finally it seemed easier not to resist. My eye was filled with puckered nipple as Joan reached over my shoulder for a fastening, and I smelled a sharp animal smell from that hair-filled armpit. When my breasts lolled out in the sun, Joan sat back so that the boat rocked sickeningly. Now Lil, I will not ask again, she said, panting, and I watched her pink tongue lick the salt from the corners of her mouth. I heard my voice say I cannot, Joan, I cannot even as I was standing up to remove my skirt. I outraged myself, standing naked in the sun with the boat rocking beneath my soles, but Joan was not outraged. She leaned back so that her sallow breasts became as flat as a boy’s, and admired me. You are a fine figure of a woman, Lil, she said sincerely. I like the way there is so much of you. I had not thought of myself in such a way before. My bulk had always been an appendage, but now, looking down on my smooth pale breasts in the sun, I was prepared to reconsider. (113)

Though not overtly sexual, this is sensual in the extreme, a celebration of flesh in a compellingly imagined allegory of rebirth. It is a rite of passage, a moment in which Lilian enters her body as the substance of the narrative of self she will metaphorically ‘write’, a narrative of resistance and independence, and ultimately of freedom. The freedom from the patriarchal empire of her father’s blustering dominance is a freedom to enter the text of her own body. This connection between woman’s body and woman’s language is virtually a staple of feminist theory. Hélène Cixous says: A woman’s body, with its thousand thresholds of ardour – once, by smashing yokes and censors, she lets it articulate the profusion of meanings that run through it in every direction – will make the old

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single grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language.4

Lilian’s rite of passage puts flesh on this abstract idea. It is only by reclaiming her body that she can claim the individuality of language and begin to write, by living out her own story in the ‘reverberating’ language of her freedom. The struggle is, of course, to extricate herself from patriarchal language, and this is at the same time to extricate herself from the Father’s bodily presence, which is both physically and sexually overpowering: You are a tight little vixen, Father said as if his teeth were clenched on the words. A tight and seamy vixen. I sat staring at the wood grain and at my hand lying on it, hearing Father breathe above my head and feeling the heat of his body against the side of my arm as he stood over me. His nearness for such a long time made me itch but I could not move, and sat feeling the blood pound in my face, and a great heat and congestion radiating from Father with his dark hidden trousers at eye level. (117)

The climax of the struggle between Father and Lilian comes when he wants to take her and her brother John to the Easter Show. Lilian has already tasted the joys of escape from Father’s (prison) house and on this day she creeps out at dawn and watches her enraged father go off without her. Waiting until the house is empty, she enters it: The house had never been mine to explore before. It was not something to be done lightly. There was power waiting for me when I took the house into my own hands, and I did not wish to rush or fumble such a delicate matter. (122)

The empty house is a very different space without Albion – no longer a prison – and when she enters the house she “listens to the silence like a symphony,” a silence which surrenders up a photograph of herself in a suit pocket in her father’s room: “I started at my own face, which smiled in a dazed way at the camera, caught for once in a moment of brief beauty” (123). It is as though, by seeing herself as other in the photograph, through her father’s gaze, she can release herself from the tyranny of that gaze and begin to see herself for

4

Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks & Isabelle Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester, 1980): 256.

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the first time. She looks at her naked body in the mirror, finally released in the silent house. When I sat on the floor in front of the mirror and spread my legs, the silence became frightening again and roared at me. It filled my ears with thick noise that ebbed and flowed like surf on a distant beach. When I met my own eyes in the mirror I thought I might be about to faint. Was this ecstasy? I filled the room with sounds like storm in treetops, like rivers, like horses galloping, and was preparing for the moment when flesh would be transformed. (125)

This is a crucial moment for Lilian, the moment when her flesh is on the verge of transforming into the full being of her self, completing what Joan had begun, inhabiting a body that is no longer an appendage but fully hers. Such a moment of freedom means escape from the story in which Lilian has been trapped, something Father will not allow. When he returns home, the ritual beating this time turns into rape, a rape that occurs on several levels of hatred, anger, and need, but which is, ultimately, an exertion of his power to prevent her spiritual escape. This is the real escape he had been ranting about, not the suspicion that she had been “off with boys.” At this moment, as the house gives back “only silence” and the only sound is “the panting of the desperate machine that was Father,” the empire of patriarchy reaches its limit, because although he can invade her he will never again be able to dominate her. Yet he has for the moment silenced her, and having found her body she must find her voice: Whatever had happened – and I would not ask myself just what that had been – had happened to a mass of flesh called Lilian, not to me. I cowered in that flesh, my self shrunk to the size of a pea, but still I tried to speak to Mother. Perhaps she would release me from it all, or take me over, or save me. (126)

But, try as she might, she cannot make the words come. The power over the body is the power over language, and for the time being Father has reasserted that power. But what Lilian cannot bring herself to speak of will not, ultimately, silence her, for the discovery of the body has become the moment from which she must begin to enter her own story, must enact the drama that frees her from the imperial domination of her father. That freedom is at the same time an escape from convention, from the tedious and banal narrative in which she had been a bit player. But for the moment the difficulties appear insurmountable, because her father seems to have turned her body back into an

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appendage, a “mass of flesh called Lilian.” When Duncan asks what is wrong with her, she replies: There is nothing up. But his hand on my knee was intolerable and his face was too close to mine. He was about to enter my skin through his face and knee. He could breathe too deeply and scatter me in many fragments. Nothing was keeping me together now. (127)

The rape is too difficult to explain, but at a metaphorical level she has felt the keenest consequence of imperial power, the power of language and the power of the colonizer to silence the invaded. This silencing is a prevention of her ability to write her own story; she has once again become a victim in the imperial drama of dominance and oppression. This crisis is resolved by Lilian in an interesting way. She regains her voice, and learns to re-enter her body, by entering Australian place. “I am going bush,” she says, “Under a country sky I needed to greet myself alone, like a stranger” (129). At this point, the discovery of the body, which is the entry to language, and the discovery of place become one and the same, for it is in postcolonial place that difference and subjectivity are discovered. This connection between the body and place immediately raises to prominence the struggle over language that occurs in colonized space. The Canadian writer Dennis Lee puts the struggle with language this way: Beneath the words our absentee masters have given us, there is an undermining silence. It saps our nerve. And beneath that silence, there is a raw welter of cadence that tumbles and strains toward words and that makes the silence a blessing because it shushes easy speech. That cadence is home.5

Lee describes his own experience of seeing writers all around him using words while he is simply “gagged.” Writing had become a problem to itself: “it had grown into a search for authenticity, but all it could manage to be was a symptom of inauthenticity.” This inauthenticity comes not from the language per se, but from the situation of the language in its particular complex of discursive relations. The language becomes a tool for constructing a different reality by initiating different forms of language use. It is invested with strategic markers through the process of naming, and adapted to the linguistic

5

Dennis Lee, “Cadence. Country. Silence: Writing in Colonial Space,” boundary 2

3.1 (Fall 1974): 164.

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processes of a prior and indigenous or, in the case of settler cultures, a developing vernacular language. Thus, for the woman and colonial subject, the ‘authentic’ language is one whose authenticity itself is constructed in the process of constructing the self. This need to write out of a sense of place is equivalent to the exhortations of écriture féminine to ‘write the body’. Cixous says: Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.6

Just as postcolonial writers needed to re-conceive of colonial space, women must ‘write their bodies’, by reconstructing, revisioning the body as a site of difference. Lilian does this by rediscovering her body in the bush. When she arrives at an obscure country town, with its Caledonian Hotel, a reminder of the continual inflection of Britain in the settlement of Australia, and looks out the window of the room they had given her, she knows she has arrived at the right place. Wiping her face with a towel with the word C A L E D O N I A N she looks out across the grey tin roof and sees sheep. “My country right or wrong, I told the towel and changed to go downstairs” (129). This is a place where women in trousers were not seen but where someone of her bulk wearing trousers strikes the town dumb. The moment of transformation comes when she goes for a swim in the river. Some boys throw rocks at her and she waits for them to leave: My body became wrinkled like a sultana, my fingers puckered and white, my feet numb. Behind me the bank of the creek rose up, thorny, dense with aggressive bushes on this side. Aborigines know how to insinuate themselves through such bushes but I, with my large white body, soft as a grub, could not. (131)

When she walks naked back to the Caledonian, “the silence spread out from me in ripples.” She has ironically appropriated the power to silence others, which will be the beginning of her power over language. Passing the publican’s daughter swinging on the banister, she tells her: “You will always remember this.” Released thus back into her body, away from the confinement

6

Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 245.

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of Father’s house and Father’s domination, she regains her strength in the bush. In the film version of the novel, Lilian walks naked from the bay up to the house to face her father. This captures very well the resistant meaning of Lilian’s re-entry into her body, for this is a fundamental resistance to his control and invasive presence, a statement of identity. But it misses the importance of her discovering herself in the bush, the engagement with postcolonial place with all its ambivalence. Walking on into the bush away from the town: How I loved all that raucous noise, shrill birds, cicadas that made my head ring when a treeful of them vibrate together, and the heady smell of eucalyptus leaf mould under dew. How full of blue and gold promise those dawns were, when some insistent bird on a branch overhead woke me, or a hot ray of light between leaves that warmed my eyelids […] I spent hours reading the scribbles on gum-trunks, and was sometimes within a dream of understanding everything. (132)

This is a lyrical moment in which the body, place, and reading come together. Even though it is a reading of the scribbly gum, it is a reading of place, a reading that will give her the dimension of spirit to begin writing her own narrative in the city. Returning to her father’s outrage and bombast, she has regathered her strength. To his “You are no daughter of mine,” she has an answer that silences him, “Then you are a cuckold, […] And Mother is a whore” (133). When the inevitable command to ‘bend over’ comes, the true meaning of Lilian’s rediscovery of her body in Australian place becomes clear: Days of watching the sun melt along horizons as it rose, flattening through the atmosphere before it pulled itself up and burst free, made it hard to move quickly, and I did not move quickly, but was gathering myself to move when Father startled me by flinging the belt down between us. Intolerable, he shouted […] The belt lay on the floor in a great silence. (133).

Language and silence are critical in the exertion of Father’s power, and silence is forced on him by the reappearance of Lilian’s renewed sense of her body. Dangerous though he has been, and remains to her, he is reduced to a blustering and impotent fool. The power-struggle has been a struggle to reclaim the body. But it has also been a struggle between language and silence, between an imperial and independent narrative of self.

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Narrative and Mobility Having re-entered language, so to speak, through the medium of her body, Lilian’s narrative begins with her appropriation of Shakespeare and the cultural capital it represents. When accused by her father of impropriety for sitting in a tree with Duncan, she responds: “We get up to Shakespeare, I said, and did not expect him to believe me. We recite Shakespeare” (98). When she proves it by reciting, he crows: “Oh, Lilian, […] you are like one of those apes taught to do things” (99). Her response to this is to keep reciting, using the authority of her Shakespeare as a weapon against the bullying of her father. She recites until he screams at her to stop, which she won’t do until he slaps her and confiscates her “William.” This is the moment when recitation, which seems to be merely mimicry, becomes the beginning of a new narrative, a narrative she inhabits triumphantly, and one she continues to ‘write’ as an adult, despite lunatic asylums and gaols. Of course, Lilian never physically writes anything; the text is her own life, and in this sense Shakespeare is appropriate, because the text is also a drama characterized by her voluble recitations and the presence of an audience. Nevertheless, this cultural capital, developed from literary learning, is one that finds itself at odds with conventional education. Indeed, to write her own story Lilian learns that she must escape many different prisons. The narrative of her life, her story, must be continually written, on the run, as she avoids the various institutions that wait to trap her. Her father’s house was a prison she learnt to escape early, but to her great disillusion she discovers the university to be a prison of the spirit. Lilian had looked forward to reading all the wisdom ever written and to thinking deeply about important things. I had planned serene hours with fearless minds who would help me resolve problems of good and evil, and what everything might mean. (102)

Instead, she collects “a few facts about enclosure laws, a list of dates and battles” (103). Her education neglects to offer her answers to these big questions: I often wanted to stand and yell down into the ring. Where is size? I would have liked to shout. What have you done with the grand and ineffable? Where is the life all around us? (103)

F.J. Stroud is less naive: “What did you expect? He wanted to know. Wisdom? [.. .] You will not find it here” (104).

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Consequently, Lilian’s life as a woman becomes characterized by freedom, an escape from the various prisons of the spirit, a freedom to become the centre of her own narrative, and she achieves this through mobility. She also achieves it by guaranteeing herself an audience, as she does when she goes to the pictures, ostensibly to become someone else for a time: But before the lights went down I remained Lil and was beginning to love defiance and being the centre of almost any kind of attention. I swelled then so that my being filled every cell of my bulk. I was huge, colossal, magnificent, when all the heads had turned, everyone was staring, a few were shouting at me, and the manager was hurrying down the aisle towards me. I belonged to myself then, and I loved the glare of public life. (144)

“I belonged to myself then” – what is occurring here is the very opposite of Althusser’s concept of interpellation, of the subject being called forth by the gaze of power. Lilian herself calls forth the gaze of others on her own terms, because her “being filled every cell” of her bulk. She has spent her life locked into the idea of her being that her father’s gaze implied and which is made concrete in the various prisons from which she escapes. Now, since reclaiming her body in the bush, she controls the narrative and the impact of her being on others. Just as she silenced the onlookers in the country town, now she commands the attention of city-dwellers. It is in the gaze of this outraged attention that she becomes fully herself, nowhere more so than when she refuses to stand for “God Save the Queen.” “If it had not been someone else’s National Anthem playing when the red plush curtain jerked apart, I might not have minded. But I did not like foreign bombast” (144). It took Australia a long time to agree that “God Save the Queen” was “foreign bombast.” It still hasn’t come to terms with the idea of Republican independence. Lilian’s example reflects poorly upon post-Federation Australia. Although Lilian escapes her father’s “foreign bombast,” and cannot be contained any longer in his house, he still has the power to have her placed in the next prison – a lunatic asylum. This is the third of the prisons in which Lilian is trapped. But all of them convince her that freedom and mobility must be gained at all costs – freedom to roam the city, to call attention to herself, freedom, above all, to move through the plot of her own story, to place herself. But even in the asylum, life went on: “Father could stop me running wild but he would not stop me being alive and enjoying whatever was to be enjoyed” (149). “I am Shakespeare,” she says to Riser the nurse, which confirms

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his idea of her madness, but which has at least two meanings. She knows so much of Shakespeare that she can recite every play. But on another level she has reached the stage at which she can invent and play out her own drama, her own story on the stage of the city. She has taken hold of that which might have colonized her and made it work to her advantage. When Father comes to visit, or to taunt her in the “loony bin,” she discards the body that she has refashioned away from his control, and instead becomes like plasticine “or stone, or sky, or anything that could go on living its own silent life when everyone thought it was dead” (154). In this way, even the “loony bin” becomes something she can control, a stage on which she can play out her own internal drama. In the end it is Aunt Kitty, thorn in the side of Albion, who rescues Lilian, by blackmailing her brother with threats of exposure: “I told him I would spread stories about his mad wife and daughter […] I told him I would spread stories about his women and he gave in” (162). Although it takes her a summer and a winter, she comes to embrace the city with its teeming life, the “tall buildings full of people with mysterious lives who came out at dusk to let their dogs relieve themselves in the gutter” (165). She embraces the prostitutes to whom she boasts of her virginity. But she admits that her “body yearned too, my passionate hidden body that was ripe now under all the layers of clothes, ripe for ecstasy. I was full of hot blood, my flesh sprang out at me full of life.” (169). The last time Lilian sees her father he is in the full regalia of his imperial character, since it is War and he is dressed in military uniform. At the funeral of Aunt Kitty, who had left everything to her, he approaches. When in his sick khaki he approached me through the flowers, I stood my ground and tried not to be afraid [. . . ] Lilian he said, as if reminding me who I was. Lilian, you are an example of the degeneracy of the white races. I must have stood blinking in my surprise and Father hissed, so that the creeping cousin stared, You are sterile and degenerate, and as corrupt as a snake. (178–9)

It is significant that the language of misogyny slides into the language of racism, for they are minted of the same coin in double colonization. But we need to go to Dark Places to find the source of this outrage. Albion had become a convert to Darwinism, believing the matter of sex was simply a business of superior men finding superior women to propagate the race with superior offspring. Clearly, this fantasy is completely dispelled by Lilian, who

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contravenes every one of Albion’s conventional notions of ‘superiority’. His outrage comes not only from his inability to control her, to contain her in his own narrative, from the fact that he cannot even understand the nature or implications of her freedom. As we see in Dark Places, ignorance and uncertainty make him ‘anxious’, and this, absurd though he is, makes him extremely dangerous. Though Lilian is a woman who yearns for love, notoriety is more seductive. This notoriety leads to gaol for two weeks – a hell that convinces her that the necessary consequence of discovering her body, and writing her own story, is mobility, an escape from the incarceration represented by the power of Father and the hidebound prejudice, convention, and ordinariness that he represents. Set free finally, she says: Ah! What a greeting the street was, with Frank waving his bottle at me beyond a tram, and the din and richness, the clamour and bustle, the colour and exuberance, all the life! How I loved it, coming out of a hell of silence! I almost knelt on the pavement and kissed it, for I saw now that this was my home, I belonged here. I was recognised, I had a part to play here, in the life of the streets. I swore I would never allow myself to be withdrawn again, but live always among these people, and be seen and heard, noticed and remembered. (197)

This moment of ecstasy and belonging is marked by the metaphors that have come to characterize Lilian’s freedom: silencing and imprisonment are synonymous to her; but she has a part to play in the drama she writes herself; she is recognized, noticed, and remembered, held in the gaze of the onlookers in a way that she controls; silence is foresworn for the volubility of her recitation; she will be mobile and travel these streets. Her father’s death makes her “weightless,” releasing the final bond with the past: I was discovering new ways of journeying through my life. It is better to travel I would remind myself, when my room began to close in around me, and Frank was nowhere to be found. No one enjoying life can afford not to journey, I told the people in the bus. (185)

The size of the audience in the bus is good, but its quality is wanting, and so she takes to getting into taxis at traffic lights. This is perhaps the most famous feature of Bea Miles’s life, but it is merely one feature among others of Lilian’s mobility. In a curious way, it is not Bea Miles who is history but Lilian – “History is not the past but the present made flesh” (205). As she moves around the city, she exhorts herself to look at the apparently insignificant but

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richly varied events around her, or to listen to the tapping of the blind man with his stick – “Listen, I told myself, this is history” (206). Rick, the tormentor of her childhood and married in a fairy-tale wedding to Ursula, has become a scruffy Domain speaker impassioned about the dictatorship of the proletariat.7 Like the narrative of her life, the narrative of history is continually being written and, as postcolonial writers know, ‘History’ only comes into being by a process of forgetting – a forgetting of the marginal, in which is contained the rich variety of ordinary life. Just as History is the present made flesh, so is the self. Whatever pasts may haunt Lilian, whatever crises overcome and triumphs achieved, whatever rites of passage negotiated, she is still a narrative in the writing, a process of selfcreation: I fill myself up now, and look with pity on those hollow men in their suits, those hollow women in their classic navy and white. They have not made themselves up from their presents and their pasts, but have let others do it for them – while I, large and plain, frightening to them and sometimes to myself, have taken the past and present into myself. (227)

By taking the present and the past into herself, by writing her own narrative, performing in her own mobile urban drama, Lilian has become History. But freeing herself from her father’s narrative, entering her body and reclaiming language, she has appropriated the power to write her own story, by being her own story. Hers has been the story of woman escaping the Empire of the Father, and in so doing she has enacted a dual allegory of dominance and freedom: freedom to reclaim the body through colonial place, to reclaim language by shedding an imperial discourse, to escape the prisons of social convention through mobility and ex-centricity, and to command the narrative of the self by continually writing a story she wants to inhabit.

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7

A ‘Domain speaker’ is someone who speaks at Sydney’s Domain Park, similar to Speakers’ Corner.

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WORKS CITED Barcan, Ruth. “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’: Bodies, Boundaries and Movement in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 29.2 (April 1998): 31–55. Also in the present volume (93–117). Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks & Isabelle Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester, 1980). Grenville, Kate. Dark Places (London: Picador, 1994). ——. Lilian’s Story (New York & London: Harcourt Brace, 1985). Healy, Alice. “‘Impossible Speech’ and the Burden of Translation: Lilian’s Story from Page to Screen,” J A S A L 5 (2006): 163–78. Also in the present volume (135–51 below). Jose, Mridula. “The Return of the Oppressed: Re-Writing the Female Self in Lilian’s Story and Joan Makes History,” in Cultural Interfaces, ed. Santosh K. Sareen, Sheel C. Nuna & Malati Mathur (New Delhi: Indialog, 2004): 100–106. Lee, Dennis. “Cadence. Country. Silence: Writing in Colonial Space,” boundary 2 3.1 (Fall 1974): 151–68. Petersen, Kirsten Holst, & Anna Rutherford, ed. A Double Colonization: Colonial & Postcolonial Women’s Writing (Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1985). Thompson, Veronica. “You Are What You Eat: Women, Eating and Identity in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Scent of Eucalyptus,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 27.4 (October 1996): 129– 37. Woolfe, Sue. “Kate Grenville: Lilian’s Story,” in Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, ed. Sue Woolfe & Kate Grenville (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993): 94–123.

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“Africa and Australia” Revisited Reading Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History

—— K WAKU L ARBI K ORANG

I

N “A F R I C A A N D A U S T R A L I A : The Post-Colonial Connection,” the Australian critic Bill Ashcroft has argued the provocative thesis that though Africa and Australia are geographically remote from each other, in terms of the existential and cultural demands made on both by and under the contemporary post-imperial world order, the two regions are not really that far removed from each other. In the one is to be found the other, Ashcroft implies, on account of “the post-colonial connection,” a connection whose basis is in “a shared experience of colonialism.” Apropos of this shared experience, Ashcroft points out that “Africa and Australia as they exist in contemporary consciousness are specifically colonial constructions [...] [sharing] historically, a similar place in the European imagination.” And the result of this has been

one of the most curious anachronisms [. . . ] the pyramidal relationship in which both Africa and Australia [. . . ] have a closer relationship with the [European] “center” than with each other. So the representation of each in the other’s eyes is that constructed in the gaze of the Other, (what Jacques Lacan calls the gaze of the “grand-autre”).1

We have a situation, therefore, where Africans and Australians have been obliged, in bad faith, to borrow the ‘colonial eyes’ of Europe, and to view each other’s experiences through those borrowed eyes as more or less disjunct and discrepant. It is this unhelpful anachronism, which proposes Africa and Aus1

Bill Ashcroft, “Africa and Australia: The Post-Colonial Connection,” Research in African Literatures 25.3 (1994): 162. All subsequent quotations from Ashcroft are from page 162.

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tralia as incomparable, that Ashcroft wants to replace with what he insists is “a dynamic of post-colonialism [... ] which connects the two regions.” This interconnecting dynamic is broadly captured by the critic, among other salient characteristics, as one “of opposition, [...] of resistance to colonialism.” A shared postcolonial dynamic therefore makes Africa’s and Australia’s ongoing responses to their shared colonial legacies comparably similar, even if in each case, as Ashcroft acknowledges, “the specific experiences of the colonizing process are quite different.” Ashcroft additionally sees a postcolonial similarity within the two regions in ongoing efforts by intellectuals and cultural workers, within the cognitive and sociocultural domains, at “conceiving of processes of change.” Therein, he concludes, Africa and Australia “each has a great deal to offer conceptually in representing their different societies.” If the interregional similarities identified by Ashcroft – as afforded by a “dynamic of post-colonialism” – permit and legitimize the Australian critic’s reading of Africa out of (and in) Australia, in this essay I invoke the same to read Australia out of (and in) Africa. And this is Australia as metonymically represented by the Australian novelist Kate Grenville in her 1988 novel Joan Makes History. One is encouraged to hear Ashcroft aver that “it is through literature and other creative arts that [the] dynamic of post-colonialism comes most readily to light.” Hence, if “resistance” and “conceiving processes of change” are two aspects of the postcolonial dynamic identified by Ashcroft, then it is insofar as Joan Makes History engages with these very issues that the novel provides a postcolonial validation for a reading of the Australia it evokes out of Africa. Legitimate though the claim of a comparative similarity between Australia and Africa on postcolonial grounds may be, this essay must begin with a caveat, one that calls for vigilance towards difference. It has been said, with the force of a truism, that when we travel we only discover ourselves. This has to be true also of the imaginative leaps we make into the dominions of others – be they racial, gendered, national, or other. This necessary preliminary reminder compels me, therefore, in my encounter with Joan Makes History, a novel by a woman who is white and Australian, to rediscover my reading self, among other salient identifications, as African, male, non-white, and non-Australian. All of these represent inescapable worldly situations that position me differentially in relation to the novel and its world. From this relational perspective, I derive a sense of my disproportionate placing from the outset in order to make a case for a mode of reading across cultures and experiences that is self-consciously ironic. In this ironic mode, the (reading) self

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encountering an Other is enjoined constantly to engage its positionalities in what one might call a cross-referential dialectic. A cautionary proposition of this nature – broadly ethical in implication – has come to be understood as underwriting and driving the cultural critique of postcolonialism. Consider, in this regard, the preeminent postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak’s caveat as she takes Jean–Paul Sartre to task for the humanistic and inter-nationalist gesture by which the latter imaginatively extends himself into the projects of others. Sartre is quoted by Spivak as observing: And, diverse though man’s projects may be, at least none of them is wholly foreign to me [. . . ]. Every project, even that of a Chinese, an Indian, or a Negro, can be understood by a European [. . . ] The European of 1945 can throw himself out of a situation which he conceives towards his limits and he may re-do in himself the project of the Chinese, of the Indian or the African.

Spivak responds thus to what she apparently sees as a naive form of humanistic identification and inter-nationalist solidarity: Commenting on such passages, Derrida wrote in 1968: “Everything occurs as if the sign ‘man’ had no origin, no historical, cultural, or linguistic limit.” Indeed, if one looks at the rhetorical trace of Rome in “none of [man’s projects] is wholly alien to me […] one realizes that the history obliterated here is that of the arrogance of the radical European humanistic conscience, which will consolidate itself by imagining the other, or as Sartre puts it, redo in himself the other’s project, through the collection of information.”2

We have Spivak, drawing on poststructuralist tenets, calling into question the wilful elision of difference in a totalizing European humanism – one that will unproblematically absorb the Other into itself. In her critique of humanism in a necessary defence of difference, she is joined by Homi Bhabha in the latter’s essay “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism.” In this essay, Bhabha deploys the (poststructuralist) category of difference to deconstruct realism, the model of reading, writing, and interpretation that poststructuralism, with its bias towards signification, has equated with representation as such.3 Bhabha castigates a 2

Gayatri Spivak, “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe / Roxana,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac & Barbara Johnson (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1991): 155. 3 Terry Eagleton summarizes the poststructuralist case against realism-as-representa-

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realist critical and literary practice for repressing its modality as a practice and hence ignoring questions concerning the materiality of texts, questions that will assign them a productive position in relation to authorial and reading subjects. Instead, idealist realism reifies the subject, whether as author, character, or reader, into a transcendent and self-sufficient entity. This original subject of realism, he argues, is then mobilized with ease to promote historicist and teleological projects, projects on whose behalf texts are guaranteed a humanistic “religiosity of immanent universal meanings.”4 The category of the ‘human’ becomes an alibi for a conveniently de-historicized reading, then serves as the dominant trope by which a realist critical practice effects the closure of textuality. Realism, in this negative characterization, is patently ideological, a form of false consciousness that effects the containment of a polymorphous textuality in a reassuring denial of difference. The stakes of Bhabha’s critique are more than literary; he implicates realism in the ideological sphere of social engineering and reproduction as a strategy underwriting what one might call a metaphoric politics of identity. A homely version of this, for example, is captured in the cliché ‘all for one and one for all’, where the relation of self to whole is expressed reciprocally in an equation that permits one to be expressive of the other and either to be representative of both. Realism, in this characterization, is shown to be of a piece with the forms of categorical and exclusionary naming through which a holistic social imaginary – Nation, Tradition, Culture, and so on – comes to be constituted. Realist strategies of naming, mobilizing a monist version of a coherent representative self as their ideological linchpin, enable and essentialize either a nationalist, or imperialist, or bourgeois agenda.

tion thus: “Realism is essentially representationalism. Such representationalism effaces the heterogeneity of textual production, insidiously naturalizes the sign, produces discursive closure, homogenizes narrative space and so voids it of contradiction, ranks its codes in a stabilizing hierarchy rather than permitting them to interrogate each other. And the effect of all this is a fixing of the specular reading or viewing subject in an ‘imaginary’ plenitude of his or her ideological position.” Eagleton, “Text, Ideology and Realism,” in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1980): 162. 4 Homi K. Bhabha, “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism,” in The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith. (Brighton: Harvester, 1984): 102.

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If such forms of naming need to be deconstructed, it is because of the repressions, suppressions, and oppressions they both naturalize and legitimize within the sphere of social relations. Bhabha’s sophisticated deconstructive account is thus set up to reveal how realist conventions of codifying social reality efface the differential – that is to say, ironic (or contradictory) – texture of social positionalities and languages in order to install a seamlessly referential version of a communal history. This purposeful bad faith of realism is located in its being ideally subservient to the investiture and hegemony of powerful social groups. Realism, in its function as a powerful aesthetic-cognitive device, in effect reaches out to subsume and silence potentially disruptive questions of gender, class, race, sexuality, etc. – the very notations of difference – in a notion of a stable, unchanging social essence. The implications of Bhabha’s anti-realist arguments are global – valid as much for metropolitan locations as for colonial/ postcolonial ones. In the latter, realism in social and historical narrativization perpetuates colonial relationships: nationalist scripts that deploy realism for an identitarian politics are shown to be implicated in a violent epistemological subordination that allows powerful groups to reformulate emergent nations in their own narcissistic image. That said, however, there are problems that the critique of realism as always already power-laden representation does not entirely escape. For one thing, in fashioning ironic models of reading in a necessary defence of difference, a postcolonial critical discourse may reify and absolutize difference as an existential condition, a move that then justifies its being set up as an indifferent explanation of our worldly situations. The paradoxical result is that, while such a discourse may pretend to refuse a transcendental naming, it does not really escape theoretical omniscience. At best, its insights offer little beyond the definition of a generalized, anti-essentialist hermeneutic of negation. While such a discourse makes for a theoretical self-consciousness that is juridical and evaluative in a far-reaching sense, it nevertheless risks calling down all realist and positivist strategies of rehabilitating the specific and the local. In place of contingent realisms, it substitutes a Realism in the singular, reducing genuine local differences to a categorical sameness. It is necessary to make discriminations on the basis of locality, for the reason that realism, at least in its deployments in certain colonial /postcolonial situations and settings, cannot simply be seen negatively as always already power-laden representation. Realism is also about gaining power, about the quest for self-empowerment for groups marginalized and denied their worth

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as such. Realism, in such circumstances, needs, above all, to be seen as necessary sponsorship of the quest to validate group experiences within the predicament of human sociality;5 it can, in those terms, function as a tactic that enables projects seeking to define alternatives for human sociability. I propose these preliminary observations regarding the questions of realism and difference as I turn to Grenville’s Joan Makes History, a text I read as negotiating – within the conventions of realist discourse – a vital postcolonial question: the matter of reinventing Australian nationhood. In this process of reinvention, Grenville’s text has first to name its difference and, from there, seek to locate strategies for the inclusive narrativization of other differences encompassed within an Australian nation-space. In my reading, I am very much aware of my own positioning as one who belongs to a society in formation: the search for viable community addressed by Grenville is as much Australian as it is African. My own desires on the national question are positively utopian. And it is on this utopian ground, therefore, that I risk a Sartrean cancellation of my difference, in a desire to coincide – in inter-nationalist solidarity – with the projects of an Australian Other, an Other who is not but who might be me.6 I thus acknowledge the possibility of seeking in Grenville’s realist project my own (nationalist) self-confirmation, my self-confirmation not simply as a desiring individual but in a representative sense as one who, like her, shares and participates in a predicament born of human sociality. 5

Craig Tapping makes a case for the necessity of representationalism in the selfvalidation of oppressed groups thus: “Despite theory’s refutation of such absolute and logocentric categories as these – ‘truth’ or ‘meaning,’ ‘purpose’ or ‘justification’ – the new literatures [. . . ] are generated from cultures for whom such terms as ‘authority’ and ‘truth’ are empirically urgent in their demands. Land claims, racial survival, cultural revival: all these demand an understanding of and response to the very concepts and structures which post-structuralist academicians refute in language games, few of which recognize the political struggles of real peoples outside such discursive frontiers.” Quoted in Stephen Slemon, “Modernism’s Last Post,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.4 (1989): 10. Repr. in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam & Helen Tiffin (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991): 5–6. 6 Cf. Clifford Geertz’s point, made in the context of ethnographic encounter, about the need to see “ourselves among others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken”; Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983): 16. See also Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999).

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I do not take this identification across the boundaries of culture, location, and positionality for granted, however. For an awareness of Spivak’s caveat against Sartrean humanism and Bhabha’s critique of realist positivism has left me with a responsible sense of irony. And this ironic perspective enjoins that I acknowledge, in Grenville’s revelation of the differences utilized by the powerful to construct and disable others in an Australian setting, the similar realities that, on the one hand, empower me at others’ expense and, on the other, disempower me to others’ advantage. To my cross-referenced encounter with Joan Makes History, therefore, I bring a reading strategy that negotiates into a socially and historically meaningful relationship a positive realism and a critical irony. I offer a reading of Grenville’s novel that, in effect, (a) validates realism in the name of purposeful social reconstruction, and (b) places critical irony at the service of the former’s evaluation. This both /and strategy of reading between positions I claim for a postcolonial critical agenda even as I observe that it underpins Grenville’s own narrative procedures. When Joan ‘makes history’ in Grenville’s novel, we might ask what the modality of that history is, for Joan is going to write the as-yet-unwritten, but from a standpoint that critically evaluates the already written text of Australian history. And if, as Edward Said observes, “novels [.. .] are aesthetic objects that fill gaps in an incomplete world,”7 then, in like manner, we could see Grenville’s novelistic intervention in a traditionally male historiographical practice as filling the gaps created by the exclusions of that practice. Consider the opening gambit of the central Joan: Allow me to introduce myself: Joan, a woman as plain as a plate, and devoid of bust [. . . ]. Allow me also to acquaint you with a small selection of those other Joans, those who made the history of this land.8

The strong narrative presence and the self-consciously ‘stagey’ mode of presentation and address both point to a transactional discursive strategy. Joan implicitly addresses here a tradition of writing that occurs at the intersection of the colonial and patriarchal: the reading (Australian male) ‘you’ is perceived as one already written and confirmed by that tradition. The narrative requirement is for the addressee to be distanced from the position this form of

7

Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins

U P , 1978): 82. 8

Kate Grenville, Joan Makes History (St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988): 5. Further page references are in the main text.

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writing has familiarized him with in order to be persuaded to see that it requires the unwritten Joans of Australia to complete a history of the nation. Miriam Dixson has observed in this connection that there are [. . . ] no women in the pantheon of Australian gods. No goddesses [. . . ] [The gods] tend to be males under all-male and dangerfraught conditions: e.g., mateship-men at Gallipoli and Ned Kelly’s all-male gang; or males who are loners and rolling-stones, nineteenthcentury Ockers, eternal sexual adolescents, one feels, exuding wariness or fear about women, and often themselves womanless. Henry Lawson and Ned Kelly will do as examples. In short, Australian gods were and are largely misogynist.9

Australian history has been a history in the singular, filtered through a masculine gaze that has promoted a male, macho, and falsely ascetic version of Australian nationality. In Grenville’s revised version, conversely, we learn that “there has been a Joan cooking, washing, and sweeping through every event of history, although she has not been mentioned until now” (5). To inaugurate her interrogation of the evasions and exclusions exercised by male social power, Grenville sets up in the early pages of her novel a conceit that demonstrates, in the idea of reproduction, a necessary linkage between history, society, and biology. Grenville’s reader is called upon to exercise his/ her imagination: Imagine [. . . ] those formless jellies from which they say we come: something – what was it? – made them desire history, clustering together and becoming particular: You be skin, I will be legs. What a journey it was, from the trilobite, the graptolite [. . . ] the tyrannosaurus rex! [. . . ] And after them came the humans who left footprints in the dust. So many births: imagine them, born every second of every day, year after year: now, and now, and now, just now there are three, four, five new humans in the world. (4)

You be skin, I will be legs: we are invited here to reveal the philosophical premise of Joan Makes History. The novel suggests that a primordial will-tobecome made primitive life-forms negotiate and articulate their differences in the interests of a common survival. For the novel, then, the idea of biology as destiny is important, but it is in the idea of history that what is biological in essence – resolved above as the question of the survival of life-forms – be9

Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia from 1788 to the Present (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1984): 11–12.

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comes a socialized imperative. Ultimately, an ethic of communal continuity and survivalism in Joan Makes History is yoked to this fundamental biologism to articulate the novel’s social critique of a stifling Australian patriarchy. The ruling metaphors of the novel are birth, birthing, and nurturance, and these are invoked strongly to underscore an ethic of social and emotional forms that will guarantee the viable reproduction of Australian national society. Human biology and human historicity are set up as the ‘universalist’ modes within which gender difference is re-thought towards the installation of an integrative politics in Joan Makes History. With allowance being made that it is primarily woman-centred, Grenville’s novel also places itself as a nationalist text. The proviso here is that its reader is required to see the subjugated knowledges of Australian womanhood as valid in any construction of an Australian national identity. To this end, the novel relies on a tactic that utilizes women as the strong, coherent narrative centres and images of an expressive realism, as well as making a commonsensical appeal to the shared, irreducible social and biological heritage of men and women. For Joan’s history, as the reiterated tropes of birth in the novel should remind us, is meant to be a species-preserving one. When she ‘makes history’, both in her central autobiographical narrative and in the micro-narrative vignettes of her surrogates, what we see is a desiring human subject who must needs enlarge a world impoverished by the sexual politics of a patriarchal culture. We must, it seems then, provisionally bracket the critique of realism in the context of a novel whose nationalist pragmatism finds its expression in the paradigmatic structures of realist discourse. What Rita Felski has to say about women’s writing in particular makes room for a positive hermeneutic with which, in many important ways, Grenville’s narrative coincides. Felski writes: Given the absence of a self-defined female subject from history and culture, women need to formulate a positive image of female identity, not only to subvert, but also to create; such an attempt cannot create from a cultural void, but must necessarily draw upon and reappropriate existing images and symbols. The construction of mythologies and the idealization of a female principle serves as a strategy through which an oppositional group can articulate a coherent and fixed identity as the basis for a critique of the problematic features of modernity.10

10

Rita Felski, “The Novel of Self-Discovery: A Necessary Fiction?” Southern Review 19.2 (1986): 144.

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Joan Makes History eminently encourages a reading based on those assumptions. For this reason, the strategies of the novel permit us to elide a deconstructive critique of the realist sign in favour of its rehabilitation. Grenville reappropriates realism to chart a nationalist moral crusade in which women, cast in coherent and positive images, spearhead an alternative consciousness of Australian nationhood. Especially in 1988 (Australia’s Bicentennial year and the year in which Joan Makes History was published), the settler-nation must be made to remember the others who contributed in no small way to the making of Australia but about whom history has hitherto been silent. Women must recount an alternative history of Australia in which men are necessarily, albeit temporarily, ‘guest effects’. A disconfirmatory irony is put to work in the microhistories of the surrogate Joans of the novel to make strange at such moments the male master-narratives of history. There is the 1878 vignette, for instance, whose introduction might lead us to expect the bushranger Ned Kelly as its principal protagonist. But Kelly, as part of the “tribe” “from up Glenrowan way” (206), is never named or described in detail, despite being a strong presence who flusters Joan in her effort to “capture his likeness for posterity” (201). The point is to write out Kelly and the ‘anti-social’ heroics of the male Australian historical epic. In its place Grenville offers us a woman’s romance narrative, quietly affirmative of the conjugal bond and of the presence of children in the “gang.” The conclusion of that piece of history shows a homely reunion of this Joan, a photographer’s apprentice, and the husband from whom she has been estranged. A similar gesture is also seen in the vignette of 1839, where we are led to expect that Joan’s success at her first agricultural venture is based solely on her own efforts. It turns out, however, that the success of the newly arrived settler is born of a collaboration of equal partners: Joan and a husband who is not mentioned as such until the last paragraph of her story. The struggle to establish a productive relationship with the land constitutes one of the powerful images of the novel – it might be set up as a metonym of the construction of Australia itself. This Joan, a newly arrived immigrant settler, tells us: “Those seeds, all our hope and our future, our sweat and toil, had swelled and burst with life: our seed had taken root and sprouted, new life had begun” (85). The fraught metaphor of birth is utilized, as so often in the novel, to promote a discourse about a higher human sociality: life and nation absolutely depend upon an equal collaboration of male and female. Joan Makes History, in such moments, images the ideal of a reformed and truly whole society.

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To invoke a rehabilitated realism as a reading strategy for Grenville’s novel, however, is not to ignore the counter-current of critique it directs against the repressive forms of historicist representation that is the heritage of Australian historiography. While Joan Makes History may be implicated in those very forms – and this is a matter addressed below – we need to acknowledge that it is a novel which attempts, with varying degrees of success and failure, to think through and beyond them. With this in mind, we could see other Joans in the novel as refusers of the positions a (male) social ideology constructs for them. Here Bhabha’s deconstructive critique provides a useful mode of analysis. In the 1901 micro-narrative, one of the surrogate Joans, a grandmother, considers what kind of history is fit to be told to her granddaughter. She concludes that it would be different from what her granddaughter would be able to read [. . . ] in any of the books [. . . ]. It was all that no one else could tell her; [. . . ] things that would look silly in a book, and no one would be tempted to make a bronze statue out of any of them. They mattered just the same, for they were the rest of history, and without them it was all wrong. Alice, I would say seriously [. . . ] Listen carefully now for this is your inheritance. (262–63)

History, as this Joan comes to understand it, is ‘made’. Authorized history is the fabrication of a discursive practice institutionalized by the apparatus of power, and so designed as to serve and conceal the powerful interests behind it. This Joan, interpreting the ceremonies of the opening of the first federal parliament in those terms, extends the novel’s scope by including a critique of Australian history as privileging the articulation of dominant white, AngloCeltic, male interests. She loses on this occasion her romantic conception of Australia as a “land of equality and justice for all,” indicting in that single moment of self-consciousness a white male capitalist ethos that glories in the orotund, formulaic phrases of a self-justifying nationalism: All those dark mouth-holes were making the history of their land, and making it in their own image, so that as far as I could hear, that history was one of pastures and acquisitions, pounds and acres: it was a history full of great men, men like themselves with whiskers and hats that concealed their eyes, and long ponderous sentences that concealed their souls. They spoke of progress [. . . ] enterprise [. . . ] initiative, and under these splendid words were others that no one quite uttered [. . . ] like cash and profit, and the images were of gold things, of wads of banknotes, of fawning bankers [. . . ] of minions pandering. It was men

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[. . . ] admiring other men for making more cash and profit [. . . ] It was an image of beating the other fellow, squeezing another few pounds out of a deal or labour out of a minion, or objects out of a heap of some raw material: it was pride in being sharp, and pleasure in paying some ferret–nosed gent to find a way of breaking the laws without the laws being able to do anything: [. . . ] Above all it was the satisfaction of having more than nearly everyone else, and feeling that they deserved it all, for having been cleverer than nearly everyone else. (257–58)

Grenville’s irony effects here a dismantling of the universalist-nationalist form and meaning that a dominant group, within the framework of a bourgeois capitalist ideology, places on an Australian history. She reveals how it effects a repression of the real, potentially disruptive inequalities in the nation’s social fabric. If the heirs of social power reduce Aboriginal persons, women, and the labouring classes to the silent spaces over which they triumphantly inscribe their own sense of national self-importance and achievement, the alternative history the Joan of this vignette will tell her granddaughter will dissolve the bond that a master-class, race, and sex has forged, to the violent exclusion of others, between the signifier of its nationalist ideology and the signified of Australian history. Joan will question a process by which a dominant group has naturalized official versions of a national history as a way of containing the Australian nation within a reassuring image of itself. The alternative she offers will be an inclusive history, one that will attempt to voice all social groups in a pan-Australian nationalism. In a general sense, this is the project that Joan Makes History envisages. The central Joan must will herself to reclaim and re-create her “inheritance,” those positive subjugated knowledges shared by (white) Australian women as an oppressed group, but she must do so in a manner that articulates it with the experiences of other marginalized groups. Juliet Mitchell, in an early phase of feminist humanism, named this strategy ‘totalism’, a concept that, according to her, stands for the expression of the protest against all oppressed conditions in the form of an assertion of complete liberation [. . . ] In ‘totalism’ the oppression of one stands for an oppression of all. Within its undifferentiated inclusiveness there is only place for tactics, not overall strategy.11

11

Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate (New York: Vintage, 1971): 24.

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While I am not positing a Joan Makes History situated within a radical feminist politics, there is still a sense in which Grenville’s novel appropriates a ‘totalist’ strategy like Mitchell’s for the ends of a woman-centered nationalism. The positive images and the positivistic identifications of the central Joan in relation to her history-making surrogates belong to the order of Mitchell’s “tactics.” For the self-aware reader, however, Grenville’s totalizing gesture may be as problematically premature in a postcolonial settler-nation as it is in a universalizing feminism. For instance, given the as-yet colonial relationship between white settler and Aboriginal native in the Australian context, how and why may the Aboriginal female’s image be rehabilitated towards an inclusive nationalist discourse? Does a middle-class, white Australian housewife wring her hands in despair and admit that she cannot write as Other? Or does she make the imaginative leap to do so in the name of an ethic of social responsibility? Joan performs the latter function and in the process cannot escape reinscribing colonialist discourse. Bhabha’s telling deconstruction of the realist image in the essay already referred to positions us to critique Joan Redman’s historiography as pernicious mythmaking in the vignettes involving the Aboriginal Joans. In those vignettes, we might read, in place of the intended register of feminine fellow-feeling through time and space and across racial positions, a reductive ventriloquism in Grenville’s project. Thus, for instance, in “Scene Three” of the novel, the restless Aboriginal heroine who wishes to ‘make history’ can only do so upon the arrival of Matthew Flinders, who carries the potent symbol of civilization, a pair of scissors. When Flinders uses the scissors on the hair of Aboriginal people, he cuts two ways. Reading between the lines, we could see the Aboriginal person being reshaped as such in a Western image and re-placed in a Western discourse of history; we could also see a stripping from Aboriginal persons of their selfsufficient power and their subordination to a violent colonial hierarchy. The figure of the scissors encodes both possibilities: it is a utility tool that is wielded as a weapon to earn the European surplus power at the Aboriginal person’s expense. Therefore, when Joan the Aboriginal woman – captured as uniquely standing apart from the pathetic commonness of her fellow women – expends herself on cutting Flinders’s hair, Grenville’s narrative passes over from realist positivism to myth, the beguiling myth of goodwill between races. For the critical reader aware of the power-differential between white and black, it is impossible to repress the kind of reading that sees this Aboriginal Joan’s unspoken compact with Flinders as a mortgaging of the future of

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her people to a white man’s history. As such, the Aboriginal past is itself forfeit; it has no value for a settler nationalism, or so Grenville’s novel would have us believe. The Aboriginal Joan of “Scene Eight” of the novel furthers this colonialist perspective in a picaresque narrative that could very well be gauged in a positive sense as a spirited performance on behalf of Australian women’s liberation. This Joan is cast in the role of an Aboriginal woman who heroically refuses the roles prescribed for her by the impositions of racism, patriarchy, Australian convictism, and capitalism: her story may thus be read as an indictment of a brutalizing colonial ethos. But we may object that our footloose Aboriginal picara heroine is such only because of the enabling conveniences of a Western, decidedly non-Aboriginal, civilization: the bicycle, the train, the stagecoach are her means of mobility and the tropes that organize her narrative. They deny her any stable reference point; indeed, of all the surrogate Joans she is the least stable. With no past to speak of, her identity remains to be defined by a dubious future: “On! The inner voice commanded,” she tells us, “and on I went, turning my back on the past like every other coward, delighting in speed” (167–68). Rather than perceiving her as the free, choosing individual of the realist text, we could read this Joan emblematically as the Aboriginal person caught in the dizzying modernity accompanying the settler colonialism that both displaces and imposes a racial amnesia on her. It would seem that Grenville’s history cannot conceive of the Aboriginal person and her structure of values outside the settler-colonial context. In such moments, her realist project finds itself complicit with the violence perpetrated by a male master-history’s appropriation of an Australian reality. Still, when all is said and done, the realist contract is what Joan Makes History urges on its reader. I have already observed that Bhabha’s sophisticated critique proceeds from a reductive definition of realism: as theoretical intervention, it explains and accounts for too much. To read Joan Makes History, therefore, is to see that the question of realism in a would-be postcolonial setting needs to be posed in relative and contextual terms. Or that, to paraphrase Felski, the modality of a text has to be gauged in terms of its reception and its function for groups specified by history and politics, “rather than an inherent characteristic of a particular aesthetic form.”12 Such questions imply that a position like Bhabha’s forecloses the possibility of seeing what useful cultural work Joan Makes History may be doing in context. 12

Felski, “The Novel of Self-Discovery,” 146.

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Grenville tasks her novel to perform historical restitution, restitution that makes visible, and thereby seeks to empower, groups otherwise unethically obliterated and ‘othered’ in the colonial-patriarchal fashioning of the image of Australia. In this regard, the realist positivism of Joan Makes History seems to me to risk going beyond critique to install a telos, to name a cultural imperative. In the process, as we discover in the main autobiographical narrative, the novel cannot help but buy into patriarchal discourse. The early separatist, careerist individualism of Joan Redman – what she thinks will ‘make history’ in the official, public sense – is submitted to judgment within a realist problematic of illusion, captured in the novel as a romantic individualism, versus a reality that is understood in terms of the primary bonds of social obligation. The ironies of the novel operate to show her original stance, which refuses matrimony, as ‘antisocial’. Ultimately, Joan Redman’s making history is interpreted as the fulfilment of a social and biological destiny, a destiny that, as observed above, is given universal validity as species-preservation through the operation of the reiterated tropes of birth and continuity. But this also entails the preservation of the social and cultural forms in which that human biological and social essentialism may be expressed. And this means that Joan Makes History ultimately capitulates to some form of patriarchy. That residue of patriarchy in the novel, however, is no objection to it, particularly if we consider where it is coming from. Dixson puts the matter in perspective: Virtually all serious analysis of Australian character – or identity – is by males about males [. . . ] As things stand at the moment, males unknowingly use history as a way of ensuring that their existence in the present is worthwhile by exploring its roots in an allegedly national past. At the same time, they effectively deny this to women. So women’s virtual obliteration from a communal past has left them without overarching perspectives, generous and airy dwellings within which they can seek their faces in the present with surer direction.13

Despite its ideological blind spots, we can still make a case for Joan Makes History as a self-conscious woman’s text that intervenes in a male Australian pre-text, as specified by Dixson, to rework it towards the production of alternative positivities. Read in relation to that male historical pre-text, Joan Makes History could be seen as a groundbreaking work that provides a space where a reconstitution of Australian women’s subjectivity might have its 13

Dixson, The Real Matilda, 13–14.

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beginnings. Then, again, its ethical drive promotes a male Australian ideal, too. Joan Redman’s husband, Duncan, could be the ideal inscription of a benevolent patriarchy grown self-conscious enough to be willing, for purposeful social ends, to negotiate away to women some of its social power. The radical gesture of the novel may be the way it metaphorizes a woman’s text into the expansive place where a pan-Australian history and nationhood will begin to emerge. In conclusion, this essay reformulates and engages once more the question with which it began: with what justification can one read oneself in the Other and the Other in oneself? One answer is that provided by Ashcroft in the “post-colonial connection” he establishes, without making light of differences, between Australia and Africa, both comparably similar in being engaged in postcolonial reconstruction. If my account of Grenville’s novel is reducible to a postcolonial allegory of Self encountering Other, this account has involved crediting her with my self here, in African solidarity with her Australian project of nationalist reconstruction. It has involved, too, withholding my self from her there, in a questioning of the shortcomings of the same – as mandated by the ethical and aesthetic critique of Spivak’s and Bhabha’s postcolonialism. The plea accompanying this both / and reading procedure is this: if a postcolonial dynamic, as Ashcroft has it, projects and promotes a new and higher human sociality; if its animating impulse is utopian, then, by implication, we seek through its instrumentality to oppose the social to the brute existential fact of difference. And ‘social’ in this sense is to be understood in terms of a domain of praxis that engages difference as a practical question of its transformation towards humanly just and satisfying ends. To this end, we need to be wary of leaning too completely towards anti-humanist and anti-realist theories that may in the end trap us in a hypostatization of difference. In that regard, what will not do is for the Self to follow the call by Paul de Man, for instance, to renounce “the nostalgia and desire for totalization, permitting the other to be itself.”14 For this leaving of what is different from the self alone, inviolate – this reading that cannot go beyond affirming the necessity of difference – is a recipe for socio-political paralysis and ethical disengagement.15 It 14

Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969), in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1969): 191. 15 See Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990): 7–8, and Asha Varadharajan, Exotic

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forecloses on the willed “processes of change” that Ashcroft identifies in and as the postcolonial dynamic. Yet to make this critique in the name of a utopian postcolonial social agenda is not to see such an agenda as working unproblematically towards smoothing over the necessity of difference. Rather, it is to imagine, as a practical social imperative, the very possibility of freeing difference from necessity towards its transformation. Frantz Fanon implies something of this nature in his observation that “it is at the heart of national consciousness that internationalism lives and grows.”16 If Fanon sees the need to transcend difference – in internationalism – he nevertheless makes an ethical case for doing so through a recognition and validation of the priority of (national) difference. For Fanon, the ‘post’-consciousness of internationalism – so-called because it comes after and is validated in a prior national consciousness – requires to be thought as a working through difference towards the fulfilment of difference. Hence, difference is not to be walled up in the invocation of a rigid separatist politics of identity; nor is it to be cancelled in a spurious universalism. As Aimé Césaire warns, “There are two ways to lose oneself: by segregation in the particular or by dilution in the ‘universal’.”17 In effect, it is in the ‘inter’ – in the active engagement with what lies between Self and Other – that self-consciousness emerges authentically. Reading Joan Makes History with this in mind, therefore, I am prompted to look two ways at once: at nationality – my African nationality and Kate Grenville’s Australian – for a validation of inter-nationality, or that ‘post’consciousness that prompts Self to see in the Other those possibilities lying, and problems shared in common, between otherwise different nationalities. In the sense that Joan Makes History intimates a world beyond the present unsatisfactory conjuncture of an Australian history, the novel’s insights are vitally postcolonial, yielding valid internationalist lessons for Africa. In the sense that the novel finds itself beholden to working through existing forms, its realism is an affirmation of national consciousness – that is, of the imagined community of the nation as a still-valid site of praxis. Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said and Spivak (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995): xvi–xix. 16 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre, tr. Constance Farrington (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967): 247–48. 17 Quoted in Miller, Theories of Africans, 24.

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The moral of the allegory of my encounter with Grenville’s novel, then, must be this: against the ironic necessity of accepting that each time we travel we discover ourselves only, we must posit the freedom to make the disclaimer, postcolonially, that in our worldly encounters we are enjoined to find in ourselves other selves. For that, it seems to me, realism is an acceptable risk – realism deployed, however, with a vigilant awareness of difference.

WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill. “Africa and Australia: The Post-Colonial Connection,” Research in African Literatures 25.3 (1994): 161–70. Bhabha, Homi K. “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism,” in The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith (Brighton: Harvester, 1984): 93–122. de Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969), in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1969): 173– 209. Dixson, Miriam. The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia from 1788 to the Present (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1984). Eagleton, Terry. “Text, Ideology and Realism,” in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1980): 149–73. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre, tr. Constance Farrington (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967). Fee, Margery. “Why C.K. Stead Didn’t Like The Bone People: Who Can Write as Other?” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 1 (Spring 1989): 11–32. Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1989). ——. “The Novel of Self-Discovery: A Necessary Fiction?” Southern Review 19.2 (1986): 131–48. Gaita, Raimond. A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999). Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Grenville, Kate. Joan Makes History (St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988). Goulston, Wendy. “Herstory’s Re / Vision of History: Women’s Narrative Subverts Imperial Discourse in Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 7 (1992): 20–27. Grieve, Norma, & Patricia Grimshaw, ed. Australian Women: Feminist Perspectives (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1981).

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Miller, Christopher. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990). Mitchell, Juliet. Woman’s Estate (New York: Vintage, 1971). Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1978). Slemon, Stephen. “Modernism’s Last Post,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.4 (1989): 3–17. Repr. in Past the Last Post: Theorizing PostColonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam & Helen Tiffin (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991): 1–11. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe / Roxana,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1991): 154–80. Varadharajan, Asha. Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995).

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“Mobility is the Key” Bodies, Boundaries, and Movement in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story

—— R UTH B ARCAN

K

G O L D S W O R T H Y O N C E P O I N T E D O U T the paradoxical dilemma of the feminist text for the feminist critic. When responding to a work of fiction in which feminist politics and preoccupations are pivotal, the feminist critic is faced with “the problem of what [...] to do [...] apart from read [such novels] with silent approval.”1 I find myself in that position with Kate Grenville’s wonderful novel Lilian’s Story – especially as it concerns the getting of a very different kind of wisdom from that which can be learnt in the quadrangles and enclosures of the university, where “the men [and women] in tweed would never change, and would always take themselves seriously.”2 Its protagonist Lilian Singer, though, is happy to receive deficient responses to her as tributes. Perhaps, then, the feminist critic can engage in a process of tribute and dialogue with the feminist text. Lilian’s Story is a book about many things: the fragility and heroism of human lives, the creation of meaningful lives out of the stuff of everyday existence, the invention of history, and the search for love and wisdom. It is also a book about flesh, bodies, and freedom. When I first read it, I was struck by its passionate intelligence about the body. When the film version was released in 1996, I heard the actress Ruth Cracknell, who played the older

1

ERRYN

Kerryn Goldsworthy, “Feminist Writings, Feminist Readings: Recent Australian Writing by Women,” Meanjin 44.4 (December 1985): 506. 2 Kate Grenville, Lilian’s Story (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1985): 209. Further page references are in the main text.

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Lilian, describing her as a woman who had the freedom of the city. It is these two responses that I would like to bring together in this essay. Lilian’s Story is a very ‘bodily’ novel: it explores issues about the body; it uses the body as a key metaphor; and the writing is full of sensory and phenomenological detail. The novel displays a sensory intelligence; it doesn’t just describe bodies, it evokes them phenomenologically. Characters are described as they would be experienced by others. Father, for example, is experienced in the narration as a collection of disjointed fragments, rather like the facts he collects in his study. He is first described as “that man of moustaches and excessive ear wax” (3–4) and later as “a man of moustaches and of shiny boots that squeaked when he walked” (5). His boots fill the house; his hand grips the banister (5). Grenville uses metonymy to build up his character in a way that suggests the fearful child’s point of view. Mother, from the child’s view, is a set of associations, such as colours and smells: “Mother was a woman of pale colours: lilacs and lavenders and the grey of galahs” (5). Cook is presented as a succession of sounds emanating from the kitchen. The narrative describes Aunt Kitty as “tinkling” and “chiming” from the necklaces and earrings that hang off her; when Lilian describes her as a chandelier (itself a beautiful image of light and sound), Aunt Kitty responds: “Try how it feels” (10). The book also explores ‘flesh’ and ‘body’ conceptually. Grenville ably demonstrates the way in which the body functions as “a site of social, political, cultural, and geographical inscriptions, production, or constitution.”3 She shows us the violence wrought by splitting mind from body, though she also shows how such a split can be a survival strategy. In Lilian’s Story, flesh is never simply the inert counterpart to the spirit, nor a mere container. Rather, Grenville understands the thoroughly social functioning of bodies and bodily processes. Food, for example, plays a major symbolic role. Much of the family’s interchange takes place at the dinner table – “over the lamb,” in fact. Both Lilian and her brother John learn to use food as consolation and strategy – a way of surviving the oppressive and authoritarian household ruled by the domineering Father. For Lilian, food soon becomes something given surreptitiously as reward, taken as consolation (84), or refused in penance (7). Throughout the novel, food functions in complex social ways: as distraction (71), pleasure (92), token of loyalty (151), asset in the fight for schoolyard 3

Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (St Leonards,

N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1994): 23.

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friendships (46), or marker of shifting affections. For Lilian, cream pies and greasy stew provide solace for the social ostracism that follows, ironically enough, from her tactical use of food, which has left her fat and marginalized. For John, food is an escape-mechanism. He chews noisy foods like carrots and celery in order to block out Father’s voice and his own misery. These noisy foods give way to the pleasures of meat during Father’s illness, and, sadly, re-emerge on Father’s unwished-for recovery. Meat becomes a symbol of raw power; in scene after scene, Father slices at it with his sharp knife. (Think, too, of the frequency with which characters’ teeth are described throughout the novel). In a novel in which the adequacy of words to the task of conveying the truth of things is held up to question, food frequently functions as the vehicle for subterranean communication, whether it be Mother’s consolatory gifts of chocolates, or the chocolate cakes John brings to the asylum: “All John’s buried love surfaced in those gaudy cakes” (151). Lilian’s fatness is, initially, the inevitable result of her adopted strategies, but becomes, eventually, a conscious choice. Fatness gives her an identity (“Now I was fat. I am a fat girl, I whispered in bed,” 17), a mode of avoiding the inescapably constraining futures that await pretty bourgeois girls. It is also, crucially, a bulwark against the tyrannical authority of Father: “there was too much flesh now for Father” (18). Fatness, then, is revealed in its complexity: reviled by many, laughed at good humouredly by Lilian /Grenville, despised by Father, and envied as strength and possibility by Aunt Kitty: “If I had only been fat enough, I could have done so much” (166). The body can also be a place of hiding. Lilian sits under the sideboard and pretends to be invisible (15). John does this in his own body. Hiding, unseeing, behind his glasses, he longs to be deaf, wrapping himself in the warm embrace of the tuba when things become too much to bear, or dizzying himself till he vomits after one of Father’s outbursts (67). Mother becomes “a woman who lived behind a curtain drawn across her face” (75). She retreats into illness and eventually into a comfortable madness, believing, against all evidence, that a Mother’s work has been done. Like the crustaceans with which they are metaphorically compared, the family seek solace from their unspoken misery in shells of their own devising. In moments of misery, the body can serve as the prisonhouse of the soul (131), but it is also the place where the soul can hide in self-preservation: “Whatever had happened [.. .] had happened to a mass of flesh called Lilian, not to me. I cowered in that flesh, my self shrunk to the size of a pea” (121). After she is raped by her father, Lilian locks herself away in her body. Protected by an “impermeable

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envelope of skin” (150), her incarceration is later literalized by Father and she is locked in an institutional ‘shell’. This defensive rupture between body and self underscores the phenomenological violence wrought when Cartesian logic is pushed to its extreme. One of the many awful things about rape – or the fear of it – is that it drives a thoroughly Cartesian wedge between ‘self’ and body. Women often live with a fear (perhaps submerged) of having their body invaded – their intimate space violated. Those who have managed to escape such fears still live with the knowledge that there is a class of crime that singles women out by dint of something about their bodies. Thus female embodiment is almost inevitably interwoven with a sense of vulnerability. For women, not feeling safe at night in the city is about, among other things, the fear that one’s body might betray one. It is the un-hideable femaleness of one’s body that puts one at risk (or makes one feel at risk).4 Thus, in addition to its physical cruelties, rape is also psychologically cruel: women cannot be at home in their bodies, since their bodies threaten always to betray them, to point to their potential vulnerability. Semiotically, the female body is the marked term. In a patriarchal society, women’s bodies mark them in certain contexts (e.g., the city at night) as potential victims of violence. Of course, research on rape shows that the statistical reality does not match these myths about rape, but the internalization of this mythology helps render many women’s own bodies alien even to themselves. In Lilian’s Story, this is certainly the new relation to her body and her sense of self that Lilian endures after she is raped: “My mouth and tongue were someone else’s now and even the words that rose into my mind had nothing to do with me” (121). The novel is greatly preoccupied with the location of one’s sense of self, and not only in relation to the rape that forms its cataclysmic centre. For Lilian, viewing oneself from the outside is a crucial survival-strategy, but also the key to potentially ecstatic communion with the natural world and with the life of the city. In order to understand this, we need to consider the function of boundaries in the novel’s metaphoric schema. Prison and protection; constraint and mobility; the inner world and the outer – these are some of the key metaphoric polarities that structure the novel. Mary Douglas’s work on bodily boundaries and ritual pollution, and Julia Kristeva’s development of Douglas’s work into a theory of abjection 4

Of course, such codings of the body are not restricted to women. Bodies function as markers of many things. Similar arguments can be made for sexuality and race.

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provide a useful frame for thinking about bodies and boundaries in Lilian’s Story. Both Douglas and Kristeva argue that the human body is a crucial site for the symbolic or ritual working-out of such separations. From the perspective of cultural anthropology, Douglas contends that the body is a key symbol for most social formations: “the body is a model which can stand in for any bounded system.”5 Between the inner and the outer lies the thin boundary that keeps the Symbolic Order – what Julia Kristeva has called “identity, system [and] order” (4) – stable. Borders are intrinsic to a sense of identity: “How can I be without border?”6 Most systems of meaning or identity are structured around sets of oppositions – between nature and culture; Self and Other; human and non-human; natural and supernatural; dead and alive; male and female, and so on. The abject is that which cannot fully be contained within such oppositions. It is a border state that “threatens to destroy life and also helps to define life”:7 “it does not respect borders, positions, rules. [It is] the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”8 The fear that such oppositions might collapse is a fear about the loss of meaning and identity. According to Kristeva, this idea is compelling, since it hints at the condition of possibility of our own identity; thus, the abject is both disgusting and seductive. It is both “a precondition and a threat to subjectivity.”9 Mary Douglas identified four kinds of “pollution” or danger that seem to threaten a society (or, by extension, any social body or “bounded system”): danger pressing on external boundaries; […] danger from transgressing the internal lines of the system; […] danger in the margins of the lines; […] danger from internal contradiction, when some of the basic postulates are denied by other basic postulates, so that at certain points the system seems to be at war with itself.10

5

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; London: Ark, 1984): 115 6 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982): 4. 7 Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” Screen 27.1 (January 1986): 46. 8 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 9 Elizabeth Grosz, “Language and the Limits of the Body: Kristeva and Abjection” in Futur*Fall: Excursions into Post-Modernity, ed. Elizabeth A. Grosz, Terry Threadgold, David Kelly & Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1986): 110. 10 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 122.

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It is interesting to think about the abject in the novel in relation to these different categories of “social pollution.”11 Family ties can be discomforting, as the close kinship relationship is one of intimate Otherness or strange familiarity. In these terms, Lilian is a ‘danger’ to Father; neither fully self nor Other to Father, she threatens him from both ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. Kristeva is interested in ritual and mythological elements in the development of individual subjectivities. Her work focuses on the mechanisms by which the proper, clean, obedient, ‘good’ body is produced out of the raw material of flesh. How does unruly flesh (“mere matter”) become the zoned, regulated and disciplined body acceptable to the cultural formation into which it is born? Douglas contended that nothing is intrinsically dirty or impure; it only becomes so in relation to a given cultural system.12 This observation was taken up by Kristeva: “there is nothing ‘loathsome’ in itself; the loathsome is that which disobeys classification rules peculiar to the given symbolic system.”13 Kristeva suggests that the child is taught (usually by the mother) how ‘correctly’ to understand its body, and how to restrain and regulate its body according to the codes and demands of its given culture. To do this, it must learn what is clean and unclean, Self and not-Self. The abject is that which is expelled or rejected in this process. It can never fully be relegated to the other side of the imaginary border that separates it from the subject.14 “Neither subject nor object,”15 it lurks, lures and threatens – part of the subject, yet expelled by it. Significantly, in terms of the preoccupations of this essay, the abject is bodily. As infants, we first learn about the clean and the unclean, the Self and the Other, via the mappings of prohibitions and injunctions imposed upon our bodies. The abject, then, is experienced viscerally – as a wave of repulsion, an urge to vomit, a gag, averted eyes, a grimace of disgust. Lilian’s Story can be read as, among other things, a poetic exploration of abjection. Grenville is interested in those whom a society expels or rejects because they threaten its systems of meaning or identity. Lilian, for example, is frequently associated with the imagery of abjection. In her fatness, ‘madness’, and brashness, she constantly threatens to overspill her bodily boundaries, and is reviled by others. Her dirty fingernails are held up as an example at school, 11

Douglas, Purity and Danger, 122. Purity and Danger, 121. 13 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 92. 14 Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine,” 46. 15 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1. 12

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her cream pie drops to the ground (86), she sweats, her flesh sags and flops in a way that is repellent to polite bourgeois society, with its girls in voile and boys in boaters. “It is hard to be fat and dignified,” she observes (54). For a woman of her class and time, she is too much – literally. She is dirty, fat, and ‘loony’. Her body threatens established codes of behaviour and systems of order. In its solidity and growing freedom, it increasingly threatens Father’s sense of his own authority and of the natural gender order, and implicitly questions his repressive belief-structure. Embodying a world of possibilities outside or beyond the world of ‘facts’, coming increasingly to evade or rebel against paternal control, and standing in metonymically for ‘body’ itself, Lilian threatens Father’s phallocentric, rationalist, and sexually repressive world. According to the logic described by Kristeva, such threats must be expelled. Father attempts to annihilate Lilian, through the very mechanism – the body – that he seeks to repugn; when she not only survives but slips further and further from his control, he has her incarcerated. Lilian may be rejected, but Father remains tied to her – perhaps even fascinated by her; he may deposit her on the other side of a border, to paraphrase Barbara Creed, but she cannot ever fully be expunged. She remains, a defiant testimony to the limits of his system of understanding the world. If we accept Douglas’s contention that the body can stand in metaphorically for any bounded system and the psychoanalytic correlate that it is “an imaginary anatomy” that constitutes the body as a human body capable of speech,16 then we can read the process of abjection as occurring on the level of the social body as well as the individual body. Perhaps, then, we can read certain groups of people as coming to stand in for what any given collectivity rejects or expels in order to maintain its own sense of coherent identity. In Lilian’s Story, the poor, for example, are portrayed as abject: the snot runs from their noses (90); or the gravy dribbles down F.J. Stroud’s chin (88). ‘Loonies’ – as those whom ‘sane’ society expels in order to maintain its own sense of normalcy – are abject. Neither ‘us’ nor ‘not-us’, they threaten our sense of stable identity, and so we lock them away. In the ‘loony bin’, the inmates pee, dribble, cry, and eat sloppily. They are institutionalized lest they collapse in on themselves and ‘infect’ others in the process. Their overflowings – screams, rantings or physical excesses – are stopped up with gags or straitjackets.

16

Grosz, “Language and the Limits of the Body,” 115.

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Yet Grenville seems to suggest that, despite our fear of it, abjection is not as fearsome as repression. Father is a man whose violent passions and untapped depths are only barely kept in check. Apart from Father, Lilian’s (and Grenville’s) most severe criticism is reserved for the emotionless man in a taxi who “gave nothing away” (164). “Serene in his nastiness” (165), the man in the taxi remains unmoved and potentially violent; Lilian wants to force this “congested” man to be “touched by the chaotic hand of emotion” (165). Rather the abject chaos of emotion than the cold certainty of reason and the world of ‘facts’. Not for nothing is Lilian’s first word in the novel “Feelingly” (4), an appropriately Shakespearian word, of course, which recalls the world of King Lear’s majestic madness: “I see it feelingly” [I V .vi.151]. Flesh, then, even in its abject manifestations, is not something to be reviled. It is no mere Cartesian machine or Christian container for the spirit. Rather, it is the element of passionate personhood, capable of transcending itself in ecstatic communion with other people, the natural world, or the life of the city. It is the stuff of life, the material out of which stories are made. Grenville has described her frustration at the codes of polite literature itself that prohibit evocations of the body’s materiality. Interestingly, she sees this silence as ultimately complicit with the oppression of women: When I started writing I felt an incredible rage and frustration, not only with the world, but also with the books that had been written about the world, because they seemed to draw a veil over so much human experience, like the pissing and shitting part of human experience, the plumbing, the squalid physicality of it. Books recognized our spirituality but not the fact that we are also bodies and that those two things are connected, especially for women. Women are constantly being told that we are all goddesses. On the other hand, women are told that their bodies are revolting and a lot of things have to be done to them before they are acceptable. So for a woman, having a physical body, especially the unacceptable things that happen about it, is a really important political and philosophical thing, as well as just an accident of physicality.17

“Books should have toilets in them,” announces Lilian to an uncomprehending Ursula (42).

17

Ray Willbanks, Speaking Volumes: Australian Writers and their Work (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1992): 101.

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The body, then, in Grenville’s world-view is dynamic and unbounded: “Four years are enough to change every pore of one’s skin,” we are told on the novel’s first page (3). Its unboundedness, although potentially terrifying, can also be ecstatic – experienced as a moment in which the boundaries of Self and Other, human and nature, natural and supernatural, break down. Lilian discovers this, for example, swimming naked in the bay at night: Out there in the private night with water making sucking noises at the boat, my body was transformed. I became an envelope of sensation, nothing but skin, as I thought about those men I loved. The boards of the boat were hardly enough to contain so much passion, which seemed about to turn the whole world into a mist of bliss. Finally in my ecstasy […] I could not resist lowering myself over the stern while the boat lay quietly on the black water. My feet felt the depths as I hung there and the water became an extension of my skin. My body was terribly white and flickered in the black water like a flame. Something began to throb through me and finally it was hard not to let go of the boat and allow any current to toy with my tremulous white body. (116–17)

But such escapes from order often produce a backlash from those whose power or whose systems of meaning or belief seem most to be threatened by them. Thus, Grenville effectively counterpoints Lilian’s blossoming realization of the possibilities for corporeal transformations – for orgasm without sex, as it were – with sinister hints that Father’s authoritarian sexual repression is becoming unstable. It is grimly fitting, then, that it should be Lilian’s first encounter with the ecstasy of the flesh in a literally sexual sense that Father interrupts and interdicts so terribly; he cannot allow such a liberating corporeal transformation to occur. Lilian must be subjected – via the flesh – to paternal interdiction and the patriarchal order of which it is a metonym. But if Lilian is never to experience the expansion of self through sexual ecstasy – leaving (or, rather, expanding) the body through rejoicing in the body – her nomadic life after she leaves the loony bin nonetheless does allow her the possibility of such seductive loosenings from the self. Her survivalstrategy of separation from her body turns into the possibility of a more ecstatic blending. At Rushcutters Bay, she listens to the sounds of the boats clanking quietly at night: if I listened hard and left my body, and became only a listening spirit among the masts, I could follow each simple tune until it was overlaid

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by another and I would follow that one then, until it in turn was overtaken. Like the lives of people, the music of the masts was something complicated and mysterious and composed of the clearest and most simple threads. I listened to one voice telling its story, then another, until I drifted away into the spaces between the stars, and left behind the body of the fat woman. (162)

Her relationship with Frank is never consummated, but is as complete a merging as any sexual union: “There were times when we seemed one flesh, separated only by the accident of bodies” (185). The dissolution of boundaries does not frighten Lilian: she has never been frightened by the stars, nor even by the blank spaces between them (202). But it is not always pleasant. When Father dies, the system of rules and prohibitions into which Lilian was born dissolves dizzyingly: And now that he was dead I knew that when I stopped laughing I would be overwhelmed by a cold vastness that was beginning to surround me. With Father gone the world lacked edges and went on, grey forever into the distance. There seemed no reason to do or not do anything. (170)

The boundaries between inner and outer world can collapse in ways that are less mystical, more mundane, but nonetheless joyous, seductive or bold. A bird accidentally flies in the open window into the house (36); a bee18 enters the classroom and sends the prim teacher cowering (55); Aunt Kitty “los[es] control” of her laugh and it goes “careening and shrieking away across the cactuses and startle[s] birds out of the trees” (83); “Yellow moons [rise] into [Lilian’s] bedroom and lur[e her] out into the night” (116). These crossings testify to the fragility of the boundary that separates human from nature. Self may flow into nature, and vice versa, in crossings that are sometimes joyous, sometimes debilitating. John, for example, seems “shadowy, as though the sunlight almost penetrated him” (118). In sum, then, the novel is greatly preoccupied with the moments and sites at which interconnection between poles commonly perceived as binaries may

18

I think irresistibly of ‘Bee’ Miles, on whose character Lilian is based. Incidentally, Bee Miles apparently preferred that spelling to the one that has been adopted for her now (‘Bea’). See Anne Summers, “The Other Side of History,” National Times (13–18 March 1978): 23. Quoted in Gerry Turcotte, “Telling Those Untold Stories: An Interview with Kate Grenville,” Southerly 47.3 (1987): 292.

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occur. Given this preoccupation, it is fitting that Grenville uses the body as a key symbol, since, according to contemporary attempts to think beyond Cartesianism, it is the body that functions as a point of mediation between what is perceived as purely internal and accessible only to the subject and what is external and publicly observable, a point from which to rethink the opposition between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the self and other.19

In her moments of bliss, Lilian’s flesh is no longer a Cartesian container, a prison, or a vessel but “an envelope of sensation, nothing but skin” (116) that becomes one with her surroundings. The skin is a metaphor for the thin, indeed porous, layer that separates inner from outer and that is itself a dynamic organ, constantly renewing and renovating itself. Narratologically, the permeability of the boundary between inner and outer worlds is suggested by the way dialogue is represented in the novel. As Roslynn Haynes points out, Grenville blurs the distinction between “inner and outer reality, between thoughts and words”20 via the idiosyncratic convention of omitting inverted commas for external speech, writing ‘external’ words in italics to distinguish them from thoughts. Haynes suggests that this “obliterati[on] of the formal distinction between verbal and non-verbal thought” helps Grenville produce a new language that “interconnects body and language,” since “words, in this novel, are invariably associated with facts and patriarchal power.”21 Grenville’s preoccupation with the permeability of boundaries between Self and Other also manifests itself as a thematic motif. In her description of others, Lilian often records the way one’s position in space alters the appearance of others. Distance and perspective change the relative size and power of others: John “look[s] like an invention” from Miss Gash’s verandah (22); Father looks naked on the beach from Lilian’s position on the headland (19); the lecturer looks “puny” from the back of the lecture theatre (79). The novel also suggests the blurring of subject and object by playing interestingly with narrative point of view. Throughout, Lilian sees herself from the 19

Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 20. Roslynn D. Haynes, “Fatalism and Feminism in the Fiction of Kate Grenville,” World Literature Written in English 31.1 (1991): 72. 21 Haynes, “Fatalism and Feminism,” 72. The phrase “interconnects body and language” is by Salzman, quoted by Haynes, 72. 20

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inside and the outside, as it were. The first-person narration often slips in and out of the third person, sometimes at moments of distress: “Anne did not bother even to glance back at the fat girl who sat awkwardly on the knob of a palm while tears dripped from her nose” (46). At other moments, the shift in perspective is used comically to suggest that Lilian considers herself to be an actor in a modest historical drama, seeing herself in the third person while experiencing herself in the first, as when she describes herself as “the fat woman shouting Hello to everyone on the street” (163). Again, her survivalstrategies are transformed into moments of celebration. Mostly, this double perspective belongs narratologically to Lilian; there are moments, though, when it belongs to the narration and the reader, functioning as a source of dramatic irony and pathos, as in the Lord Kitchener episode, where the reader’s ‘external’ point of view is clearly authenticated over Lilian’s mistaken belief that the banker is returning her love via tiny, bashful signals (177ff). Sometimes, Grenville employs a dual perspective to suggest the complete lack of understanding of one individual by another, the horrible violence done to personhood once someone is framed as the object of a certain discourse, and can be made legible only through that frame. For example, the nurse misreads Lilian’s response to her mother’s death as “an attempted self-destruction” (152), when ‘really’ it is an act of self-understanding and self-preservation. To my mind, the richest moments of the novel, narratologically speaking, are those where the narration becomes multi-layered: where in tandem with the ironic self-spectatorship of Lilian’s first-person narration somehow comes the illusion of an ironic omniscient narration. The descriptions of Lilian’s growing ‘madness’ function this way, such that we see her through two lenses at once: as a comic commentator on the follies of others, and as a woman falling prey to delusions. Interestingly, Grenville imagines this narratological subtlety as itself a kind of pleasurable merging: “Lilian is right on the edge […] because the reader is forced into a very close rapport with her and he [sic] has to submerge into her way of seeing the world.”22 Mostly, though, the device of dual perspective functions as a narratological index to one of the novel’s key themes: the idea that ordinary lives are history, too (a theme Grenville took up later in Joan Makes History). The novel suggests that much of our socialization is about teaching us that our lives don’t matter: “You think you’re Christmas… you think you’re someone special and you’re not,” shouts Ursula spitefully (46). This is the lesson that John learns: 22

Willbanks, Speaking Volumes, 103.

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“There is nothing that matters, he told me. And even that does not matter much” (81). But Lilian’s credo is the opposite: “there was nothing that did not matter” (81). Lilian hates the history she is taught at university, for, in her world, history is not a procession of facts but lived experience (99–100). “History is not the past, but the present made flesh” (192), Lilian tells us, near the end of her life. History is about the body, and nature, and the way people live their lives. “I am history, and so are you,” she shouts from her soap box (192). The narrative strategy whereby Lilian regards her own image as though through the eyes of others is thus thematically appropriate. Towards the end of her life, this strategy become less and less about surviving pain by separating out from the self than a joyful and iconoclastic way of becoming and living history, in the corporeal, encompassing way promised by her bulk. Released from the confines of institution, home, and family, ‘liberated’ to roam the streets of Sydney, Lilian becomes subject and object at once – able to be herself and see herself as others do. Becoming a story to be taken home by all those she encounters, repeated over many years, even handed down to another generation, she transcends time and space and takes her place in history: Those policemen went home with the story of Lil, to tell their wives. I loved the knowledge that these muscular men would be taking me home, into the warm kitchen where their wives stood mashing potatoes and the baby gaped and gestured. I saw Lil Singer today, he might say. His wife would stop her mashing and wait with the saucepan in her hand for her husband to join her small life with my big one by telling his story. She was causing an obstruction, my policeman would say, and kick at the lino in his inadequacy, for there are born storytellers, but policemen and their formulas are not among their number. She said some stuff at me […] What did she say, exactly? she might ask, but it would be unreasonable to expect him to remember, and the baby might have her own ideas, and a better flair for a story than her father. (189)

In this retelling, part of Lilian is still out there with ‘her’ policeman. The detail and corporeality of her imaginings suggests that even in random, chaotic, and fleeting exchanges between people, human existence can have tangible effects. The human person is not restricted by the material boundaries and limits that constrain her corporeal existence; the person can ‘flow’ in unpredictable, ‘rhizomatic’ ways, rippling out beyond her body and into the unknown spaces of the city and other human lives, transforming herself in the

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process. For Grenville, storytelling – narrative – is how small lives transcend their limits and join with other small lives, or the ‘big lives’ of bold characters (189). One bold historical character who stars in this book is Shakespeare. The literary patriarch is domesticated by Lilian (who calls him “William”), and in her recitations he is transformed into an instrument of rebellion against patriarchy and convention. She lets him loose in an abject torrent against Father (96), then later as she foists him on her fellow Sydneysiders, whether they will or no. Freed from the stultifying institutional context of the university that threatened to contain him, and embodied in the grand personage of Lilian herself (“I am Shakespeare,” 147), William goes mobile. The Shakespearian tome may have been drowned by Father (96), but Lilian can remake the greatest figure in literary history after her own fashion. That Lilian should see herself as a character in an historical drama is, of course, beautifully apposite, since as a character she herself blurs the boundary between the fictional and the real. She is and is not Bea Miles. Many Australian readers of the book will have heard stories of the real-life Bea Miles or even had personal experience of her, and so every now and then one has the beautifully unsettling experience of fancying that one hears a snatch of the ‘real’ Bea speaking through the novel. At this point, I want to return to the actress Ruth Cracknell’s comments about Bea Miles, because my twin preoccupations of body and city overlap in the themes and symbols of mobility and freedom. Cracknell said that Bea was a woman who had the freedom of the city, a freedom that can paradoxically be obtained only by living outside of (or failing to meet) social norms. Lilian comes to find a kind of freedom and even power in her rejection of such norms. She absents herself from the normal relations of monetary exchange that obtain in the capitalist city and invents her own kind of economy: I will not wear out the seat, I told [the tram conductor], and I will breathe only the air I am entitled to, and will provide a free recitation for your pleasure. (186)

In the stormwater drain with Jewel and Frank, she finds the happy family that her proper bourgeois family never was. Thus this novel that is so much about patriarchal policing – of acceptable female bodies, of female sexuality, of daughters, wives, and futures – ends nonetheless with the figure of a woman who, through losing everything bourgeois society held dear, finds her freedom. If there is a romanticization of poverty here, it is one that I nonetheless find very moving.

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It is also very refreshing to see images of mobility and movement put to feminist ends and championed as possibilities for women, for in Western narrative traditions mobility has often been masculinized. Teresa de Lauretis, among others, argues that a subtly gendered archetypal structure is fundamental to the patterns of Western narratives: the passage of a hero across a boundary: that is, a primary “conflict of hero and antagonist (obstacle).”23 She draws on the work of the narratologist Jurij Lotman, who reduced Vladimir Propp’s well-known list of thirty-one narrative functions to an endlessly repeatable duality: “entry into a closed space, and emergence from it.”24 In this pattern, the closed space (the space of ‘home’) is usually feminized, such that action becomes the province of the male hero. In Lilian’s Story, Lilian soon learns that girls cannot be heroes except in their minds (25), that Joan of Arc gets “hurried over in the history book,” and that “Boadicea was just a witch in woad” (29). Many female readers might therefore rejoice in the freedom, mobility, and heroism accorded to Lilian and in the novel’s appropriation of the metaphor of forward, linear movement for a female protagonist. Think of the triumphant closing words: “Drive on, George, I cried at him. I am ready for whatever comes next” (211). This triumph is all the more poignant, given the novel’s powerful evocation of the patriarchal injunction against female mobility. As Mother so wonderfully puts it, “A lady does not hurtle, Lilian dear” (15). Think too, of Father’s ghastly command to Mother – “Don’t move” – as he tries to impregnate her with a son and heir (4), or the photographer’s similar injunction to Lilian as he attempts to produce a photograph of her in which she will resemble the girl she is meant to be – a bourgeois girl in frills (8). The prohibition on female mobility functions as a key metaphor. As a child, Lilian’s boots are always too tight (21); inside the asylum, she thinks of herself as having been shot through the feet (148). Her freedom is metaphorically linked to her refusal of the prohibition on mobility. After the rape, she goes walkabout on foot; after her return, she escapes every night from the house. When her worn shoe-leather begins to arouse suspicion, she procures a bicycle, instrument of mobility and thus evasion: “Father did not know that it was now in my power to go where I pleased” (134). We might recall here the scandal caused by the introduction of the bicycle to Australia in the 1890s, 23

Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1984): 118. 24 Lotman, quoted in de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 118.

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out of which arose the regulatory stereotype of the female cyclist, a woman who shocked bourgeois norms by being ‘astride’, ‘atop’, and, worst of all, mobile. According to Penny Russell, in her delightful essay on bicycles and the New Woman, public debate about female cyclists centred on the sexual liberation or stimulation that seemed likely to accompany their mobility. “Alarm about the female cyclist centred on her legs,” since “the forked body astride a modern machine could be represented as an essentially sexual image.”25 It is precisely this assumed relation between mobility and sexual freedom that Father finds so threatening in Lilian. But she remains undaunted. On her release from the institution, her motto becomes, “It is better to travel hopefully” (158), abbreviated, when hope seems scarce on the ground, to “It is better to travel” (163). “Mobility is the key,” she announces as she steps into other people’s taxis (189). The taxi itself is an interesting social space.26 In the contemporary Australian context at least, they are often caught by old people no longer able to drive, by a certain generation of women who were never ‘allowed’ by their husbands to learn to drive, by adolescent girls too young to have a license, or by people too drunk to drive and fearing being caught by the so-called ‘booze bus’. They are, by convention, deemed a safe space for women, a culturally licensed exception to the rule that women must never get into a car with a man they don’t know. Paradoxically, women get into this ‘sanctified’ car with a strange man at night precisely in order that they might be protected from other ‘strange men’. The social contract that says these men and these cars are safe has come about precisely because the city at night isn’t safe for women.27 Given the special status of the taxi in relation to the discourses of safety and mobility that form part of the disciplinary techniques that keep women safe but constricted, it is interesting that Lilian should hijack taxis and make their space work for her.

25

Penny Russell, “Recycling Femininity: Old Ladies and New Women,” in Australian Cultural History 13 (1994): 35. 26 I am grateful here for some discussions a long time ago, and in another context, with Bruce Clezy – academic and taxi driver – about the space of the taxi. 27 Sadly, this protected space has become unsafe for the very men who inhabit it – the taxi drivers. There has been a spate of gruesome assaults and murders of taxi drivers in Australia, which has had itself to be met with a whole range of protective technologies.

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Feminist analysts from many different disciplines have long argued that women have particular kinds of relations to space in patriarchy. Feminist architects and town planners, for example, claim that women play little role in urban planning and architectural decisions and that cities are, literally, ‘manmade’. Modern cities have been planned to segregate different aspects of life [. . . ] this segregation has affected women more than men, because our lives have never been so neatly partitioned between the different areas of work, leisure and home in the way that men’s have.28

Women’s movement is restricted at night, especially in the city, and women are often implicitly held to be responsible for violence done to them if they leave their homes at night. Elizabeth Wilson has argued that “almost from the beginning, the presence of women in cities, and particularly in city streets, has been questioned, and the controlling and surveillance aspects of city life have always been directed particularly at women.”29 She argues that in many different cultures, the city has come to symbolize the place where the forbidden – “what is most feared and desired”30 – becomes possible. Women’s presence in the city has often been cast as a problem, and the city has been seen as the site for the potential unleashing of women’s sexuality, which has led to the control and protection of women, two projects that have often gone hand in hand.31 The notion of women’s space being restricted applies not only to urban design but also to the very bodies we inhabit. In 1979, Marianne Lyra–Wex published a startling collection of over two thousand photographs of women, men, and children in public space. They told a striking tale: that women’s bodies have been disciplined, in the Foucauldian sense, to take up as little space as possible. Such a finding is supported by feminist phenomenologists, such as Iris Marion Young, whose analysis of women’s bodily comportment and motility in space argues that in contemporary urban societies, women’s

28

Matrix, Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment (London: Pluto,

1984): 3, 4. 29

Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, The Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago, 1991): 14. 30 Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, 6. 31 The Sphinx in the City, 16.

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spatiality can be characterized as ‘enclosed,’ ‘privative,’ inward–directed, and more limited than men’s.32 She observes that women frequently tend not to move openly, keeping their limbs closed around themselves. To open her body in free, active, open extension and bold outward–directedness is for a woman to invite objectification.33

As Young goes on to observe, women also experience “the threat of being seen” in a more extreme form – the threat of “spatial and bodily invasion” in the form of rape.34 As many women can testify, this threat of invasion of intimate bodily space leads to a (self)imposed prohibition on the free circulation in public space. Thus, the prohibition on women (and other subordinate groups, such as poor men) taking up space applies both to the city streets and to the body itself. It is around the issue and metaphor of mobility that my two main interests in Lilian’s Story – the body and the city – come most clearly together. Following Mary Douglas’s precept, quoted earlier, that “the body is a model which can stand in for any bounded system,”35 we can think of the body and the city as dynamic, open systems, bounded by a provisional, fluid, and semipermeable membrane, and capable of carrying a wide range of symbolic meanings. From the perspective of cultural anthropology, “Just as it is true that everything symbolises the body, so it is equally true [.. .] that the body symbolises everything else.”36 In the light of this, Lilian’s fatness is an act of defiance. The girl who starts life not fitting her own body (her hands are too large for her, “as if [she were] trying on someone else’s,” 8) learns to fill her own body, to take up space, and, finally, to foist her way into the public sphere. In a world in which

32

Marianne Lyra–Wex, ‘Let’s Take Back our Space’: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, tr. J. Albert (“Weibliche” und “männliche” Körpersprache als Folge patriarchalischer Machtverhältnisse, 1979; Frankfurt am Main: Frauenliteraturverlag, 1984): 154–55. 33 Lyra–Wex, ‘Let’s Take Back our Space’, 155. 34 Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Bodily Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in Throwing Like A Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1990): 155. 35 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 115. 36 Purity and Danger, 122.

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women are taught to take up as little space as possible, Lilian learns to hijack the flows of the city for her own ends. The prevalence of metaphors of silence, drowning, and suffocation has often been commented on by critics and by Grenville herself.37 In Lilian’s Story, those, like Alma, Mother, Lilian or John, who suffer under the rule of Father or the patriarchal law of which he is a symbol are often rendered speechless; Grenville frequently describes them as “congested.” It’s an interesting choice of word, as it resonates within a number of overlapping metaphoric schemata simultaneously: it is a bodily metaphor, a traffic one, and one of suffocation and inner crowding. Lilian’s triumph over the policemen is thus also a victory for the body. “She was causing an obstruction,” (189), laments one of them. She has graduated from blocking doorways to obstruct fellow children (18) to learning to ‘congest’ the masculine public domain and clog up that epitome of modernity – the transport system. Rather than becoming ‘congested’ in her own body, she congests the city-body until her voice is heard. She thus learns to evade the regulatory mechanism of the modern city – both as a woman whose eccentricity (or madness) paradoxically grants her the freedom to move and flow across the city, and also as a self-taught master of transport, hopping on and off buses, ferries, hijacking taxis, and finally being chauffeured around her city for one last tour. Some may say that there is something well and truly romantic about a tale in which the rape of a woman leads, albeit eventually and indirectly, to her having freedom of movement in the city by day and by night, in a world where such material possibilities are still very far from real for contemporary urban women. As a symbolic triumph, though, it is very satisfying, for Lilian does, symbolically, ‘reclaim the night’. In any case, Grenville certainly makes clear the material and personal costs of Lilian’s triumph. In her essay “Bodies–Cities,” Elizabeth Grosz writes of the “constitutive and mutually defining relation between bodies and cities.”38 She defines the body as a material structure that is naturally “incomplete,” gaining its “unity, cohesiveness, and organization” through the “social triggering” and “long-

37

See, for example, Gerry Turcotte, “ ‘ The Ultimate Oppression’: Discourse Politics in Kate Grenville’s Fiction,” World Literature Written in English 29.1 (Spring 1989): 64–85; Turcotte, “Telling those Untold Stories,” 284–99; and Gina Mercer, “Newer Voices, 2: Kate Grenville,” Southerly 45.3 (September 1985): 295–300. 38 Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies–Cities,” in Sexuality and Space ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992): 242.

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term ‘administration’” and regulation of its potentialities.39 The body becomes “human” by a cultural process in which a sense of self and a set of bodily coordinates come largely to coincide.40 The illusion of coherence and unity is produced through a “relation of introjections and projections” between the body and its environment. The city Grosz defines in similar terms: as a complex and interactive network which links together, often in an unintegrated and de facto way, a number of disparate social activities, processes, and relations, with a number of imaginary and real, projected or actual architectural, geographic, civic and public relations.

According to Grosz, the city brings together many types of flows (informational, economic, interpersonal, familial and so on) to create “a semipermanent but ever-changing built environment or milieu.” Cities, like bodies, are thus dynamic systems of flows and exchanges in a material domain. With both bodies and cities, the experience of coherence is about the coincidence of imaginary and physical space: The city provides the order and organization that automatically links otherwise unrelated bodies. For example, it links the affluent lifestyle of the banker or professional to the squalor of the vagrant, or homeless, or the impoverished without necessarily positing a conscious or intentional will-to-exploit.41

Grenville characterizes these flows and exchanges using the metaphor of stories. She imagines the city as a web of narratives that may brush against or intersect with each other in unpredictable ways. The reappearance of F.J. Stroud, Ursula, and Rick, for example, while unconvincing in a naturalistic sense, is thus symbolically appropriate. People tell stories and are created in the stories of others, and the city is constituted by these different stories. Lord Kitchener, as he was in Lilian’s story, might really be Brian, or Lloyd, and have a story of his own (182–83). Interestingly, there is a substantial though not uncontested tradition of this metaphor within urban studies itself. Kevin Lynch, for example, thought of the city as legible, a bit like a printed page.42 Roland Barthes was familiar 39

Grosz, “Bodies–Cities,” 243. Grosz, “Bodies–Cities,” 243–44, and see also Grosz, Volatile Bodies. The remaining quotations in this paragraph are from “Bodies–Cities,” 244. 41 Grosz, “Bodies–Cities,” 243. 42 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1960): 3. 40

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with Lynch’s work, which may be what inspired him to his own version of the metaphor: the city is a piece of writing; the person moving around in the city, that is the user of the city (which we all are) is a sort of reader who, according to his [sic] obligations and movements, takes out fragments of the utterance in order to actualise them in secret. When we move around in a city, we are all in the situation of readers of Queneau’s 100,000 million poems, where you can discover a different poem by changing a single line; without knowing it we are a little bit like this avant-garde reader whenever we are in a city.43

Michel de Certeau conceived of the city streets as a metaphor for a positioned analysis that takes the everyday experiences of people seriously. For de Certeau, as for Grenville, people going about their ordinary business in the city street are unnamed heroes. De Certeau dedicates his Practice of Everyday Life to “the ordinary man,” a “common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets.” The coming to prominence of this “multitude of quantified heroes” is the result of “the advent of the number, [which] comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics.”44 De Certeau appropriates the rhetoric of heroism for “ordinary” people; Lilian’s Story goes a step further and allows women a place in this celebration and heroicization of the everyday. Like both Barthes and Grenville, de Certeau bases his study of everyday life on a linguistic analogy a multitude of quantified heroes […] lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one.45

He conceives of these “unrecognized producers” as “poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalized rationality.”46 He, too, uses this image to celebrate the resistance of ordinary people to the dominant forces that threaten to constrain them: “The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus 43

Roland Barthes, “Sémiologie et urbanisme,” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 153 (1970-71): 13. 44 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven F. Rendall (Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P, 1984): n.p. 45 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, n.p. 46 The Practice of Everyday Life, xviii.

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lend a political dimension to everyday practice.”47 Lilian can be read as a hero in de Certeau’s sense – someone whose very marginalization can paradoxically become a source of power. She manages, that is, to “escape without leaving.”48 The metaphor of the city-poem is not without its critics. The architect Martin Krampen, for example, argues vehemently against the facile use of “the ill-founded linguistic analogy.”49 Certainly, it is a romantic metaphor. But Grenville puts it to beautiful and appropriate use in Lilian’s Story. Lilian, after all, is both a conduit for great poetry, through her recitations of Shakespeare, and a catalyst for others to discover their own poetic selves. True to the etymology of the word ‘poetry’ (from the Greek poesis, or ‘making’), she inspires others to invent themselves by telling their stories. The Slavic taxi driver is “inspired [... ] into a flight of invention” (190); a woman on the tram invents herself creatively and becomes beautiful in the telling (188); even a “timid” and “hollow” passenger enriches his life “by the small story he would be able to tell” (191). Lilian’s presence is the catalyst for webs of stories that will be woven across the city and over generations. The truth of this was beautifully borne out in the radio interview I heard around the time of the film version’s release in Sydney, where listeners from across the city rang up with the story of their encounter with Bea Miles, and a web of scarcely connecting threads was formed in the process. So one of the things I can say in tribute to this book is that it invigorated critical tropes that had previously seemed to me rather Romantic and politically lean. In terms of my awkwardness about the relation between the feminist writer and the feminist critic, then, I am happy to see academic tropes given meaning, power, and passion by fiction, as well as the other way around. To say that a book like Lilian’s Story reinvigorates critical tropes is to be reminded of the potential effects of fiction, for just as Lilian sees her presence as that of a generator of stories and a catalyst for self-poesis, Grenville’s description of the process of writing Lilian’s Story reminded me of Barthes’

47

de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xvii. John Frow, “Michel de Certeau and the Practice of Representation,” Cultural Studies 5.1 (1991): 57. 49 Martin Krampen, Meaning in the Urban Environment (London: Pion, 1979), Preface: 36. 48

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conception of the writer as combinateur (a ‘combiner’)50 and of the distinction he makes in S/Z between readerly (lisible) and writerly (scriptible) texts. For Barthes, the writerly text was one in which readers function as producers rather than consumers – a text whose openness allows for an unpredictable and unlimited plurality of meanings: In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach […]; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.51

For Barthes, this text was an ideal rather than a form; indeed, it could be as much a strategy of reading as a textual given. While Lilian’s Story is in no way marked by the kinds of formal experimentation that one might expect of Barthes’ writerly texts, I choose to close with this critical trope, as I see in this novel, and in Grenville’s description of the process of writing it, an exemplum of the most dramatic dissolution of boundaries of all – the breaking-down of the distinction between reader and writer: I didn’t think it out at all. I never had any idea how it was going to end. It was a really exhilarating book to write. The first two novels I wrote, which were such a disaster, I’d planned really carefully, with chapter headings. I knew exactly what each chapter was going to do, and it just died on the page. I got bored writing it, I think, because I knew what was going to happen. But with Lilian’s Story I felt like a reader. I didn’t know what was going to happen on the next page. I had to keep writing to find out what would emerge.52

Perhaps the greatest tribute I can offer as reader is that I did the same.

50

Roland Barthes & Maurice Nadeau, Sur la littérature (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1980): 23. 51 Roland Barthes, S/Z, tr. Richard Miller (S/Z, 1970; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990): 5–6, emphasis in original. 52 Jennifer Ellison, Rooms of Their Own (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986): 159– 60.

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WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. “Sémiologie et urbanisme,” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 153 (1970– 71): 11–13. ——. S/Z, tr. Richard Miller (S/Z, 1970; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). ——, & Maurice Nadeau. Sur la littérature (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1980). Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. tr. Steven F. Rendall (Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P, 1984). Cracknell, Ruth. Interview with Richard Glover. A B C Radio 2BL (30 April 1996). Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection,” Screen 27.1 (January 1986): 44–70. Domaradzki, Jerzy, dir. Lilian’s Story (Movieco Australia, 1996). Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; London: Ark, 1984). Ellison, Jennifer. Rooms of Their Own (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986). Frow, John. “Michel de Certeau and the Practice of Representation,” Cultural Studies 5.1 (1991): 52–60. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. “Feminist Writings, Feminist Readings: Recent Australian Writing by Women,” Meanjin 44.4 (December 1985): 506–15. Grenville, Kate. Joan Makes History (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988). ——. Lilian’s Story (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1985). Grosz, Elizabeth A. “Bodies–Cities,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992): 241–53. ——. “Language and the Limits of the Body: Kristeva and Abjection,” in Futur*Fall: Excursions into Post-Modernity ed. Elizabeth A. Grosz, Terry Threadgold, David Kelly & Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1986): 106–17. ——. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1994). Haynes, Roslynn D. “Fatalism and Feminism in the Fiction of Kate Grenville,” World Literature Written in English 31.1 (1991): 60–79. Krampen, Martin. Meaning in the Urban Environment (London: Pion, 1979). Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982). Lauretis, Teresa de. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1984). Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City (Cambridge, M A : M I T Press, 1960). Lyra–Wex, Marianne. ‘Let’s Take Back our Space’: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, tr. J. Albert (“Weibliche” und “männliche” Körpersprache als Folge patriarchalischer Machtverhältnisse, 1979; Frankfurt am Main: Frauenliteraturverlag, 1984).

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Matrix. Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment (London: Pluto, 1984). Mercer, Gina. “Newer Voices, 2: Kate Grenville,” Southerly 45.3 (September 1985): 295–300. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale, tr. Laurence Scott, intro. Svatava Pirkova–Jakobson, new intro. by Alan Dundes, preface by Louis A. Wagner (1927; tr. 1958; Austin: U of Texas P, 2nd, rev. ed. 1968). Russell, Penny. “Recycling Femininity: Old Ladies and New Women,” Australian Cultural History 13 (1994): 31–51. Turcotte, Gerry. “Telling Those Untold Stories: An Interview with Kate Grenville,” Southerly 47.3 (September 1987): 284–99. ——. “ ‘ The Ultimate Oppression’: Discourse Politics in Kate Grenville’s Fiction,” World Literature Written in English 29.1 (Spring 1989): 64–85. Willbanks, Ray. Speaking Volumes: Australian Writers and their Work (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1991). Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, The Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago, 1991). Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Bodily Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in Young, Throwing Like A Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1990): 141–59.

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Homeless and Foreign The Heroines of Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse

—— K ATE L IVETT

T

regarding the related conditions of alienation of the heroines of Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse. These novels investigate the flipsides of this alienation that, I will argue, are respectively conditions of homelessness and foreignness. The essay will map the grid of these novels’ interrelation via their parallelisms: two heroines, two conditions of estrangement, both driven by traumatic abuse to make a choice regarding subjectivity from terms in a proscriptively binary structure. Ultimately, then, I show that Lilian and Louise both move away from the full adult (male) subjectivity that the concept of the ‘hero’ in narrative presupposes. In doing so, I argue, Grenville’s first two novels provide a mutually reinforcing argument that, whatever heroines may choose, whether it is to reject or to embrace norms of identity, they are rendered overdetermined “strangers to themselves.”1 In order to feel ‘at home’ to themselves, they make the choice to abandon their attempts to gain full subjecthood. Instead, they opt to remain ‘outside’ of normative female positions, and to dwell in the imaginary – Lilian performs this in the language of ‘madness’, while Louise enacts it in polymorphously perverse sexuality. For these heroines, I contend, these pathologized identities give them contingent, yet productive, access to the categories of homelessness and foreignness, in ways that heal their divided selves. Accordingly, I conclude that both women find a home in homelessness, and a sense of self in deliberate estrangement. Although published within the space of two years, Grenville’s first novels, Lilian’s Story (1985) and Dreamhouse (1986), have generally been regarded 1

HIS ESSAY MAKES A CLAIM

Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Étrangers à nousmêmes, 1988; New York: Columbia U P , 1991): 5.

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in the critical material as quite different texts. These assumptions of difference are based on the very distinct genres and settings of the novels, and the ostensibly quite distinct subjectivities of the heroines. Lilian’s Story is more obviously a narrative of resistance to conventional female roles – what Veronica Thompson argues are “the problems of establishing female identity within a patriarchal and an imperial framework.”2 Structurally, Lilian’s Story has been read by the Grenville scholar Susan Midalia explicitly in terms of its genre as an “anti-female Bildungsroman,”3 and most commentators on the novel have explicated the construction of Lilian as a feminist heroine who resists patriarchal authority.4 Dreamhouse is also addressed in terms of its genre, that of postmodern parody /pastiche (gothic, romance, comedy of manners, travel memoir).5 Dreamhouse depicts the space of a dream, an intense yet temporary condition – what Roland Barthes would term the ambivalence of the sojourn.6 The most significant issue here for comparisons of subjectivity in Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse is the inherent temporalities of their respective genres: the Bildungsroman’s span of a lifetime versus the delimited capturing of a subject at a particular moment of a life. The asymmetricality of these narrative temporalities masks the otherwise parallel and interwoven stories and subjects.7 This claim is supported directly 2

Veronica Thompson, “You Are What You Eat: Women, Eating and Identity in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Scent of Eucalyptus,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 27.4 (October 1996): 132. 3 Susan Midalia, “Art for Woman’s Sake: Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story as Female Bildungsroman,” in Constructing Gender: Feminism in Literary Studies, ed. Hilary Fraser & R.S. White (Nedlands, W A : U of Western Australia P , 1994): 253–68. 4 See Thompson, “You Are What You Eat,” 132; Ken Gelder & Paul Salzman, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–88 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 78; and Delys Bird, “New Narrations: Contemporary Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Webby (Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 2000): 187. 5 Susan Midalia, “Re-Writing Woman: Genre Politics and Female Identity in Kate Grenville’s Dreamhouse,” Australian Literary Studies 16.1 (May 1993): 33. 6 Roland Barthes, “Pierre Loti: Aziyadé,” in New Critical Essays, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980): 105–21. 7 Despite acknowledging the similarities between Lilian’s Story and Joan Makes History, arguing that they “look at some of the same things from a different angle,” Peter Craven is too focused on judging Dreamhouse, and on the character of Rennie and Louise’s relation to him, to notice that this same similarity is evident in a com-

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by Grenville’s own ruminations: in an interview on the writing of Lilian’s Story, Grenville says she had been inspired by consideration of how it feels to be a big loud rude active woman instead of a little meek polite one. Dreamhouse had been a book about passivity and lack of self-knowledge – the exact mirror image of that. Looking back now, it’s almost as if I had written one side of the equation in Dreamhouse and wanted to write the other side.8

A comparative study of these novels, then, demonstrates the coterminous web of self, situation, and choice that their heroines enact. Using two theories of alienation in modernity, this essay will first take up “one side of the equation,” by explicating the condition of Lilian’s homelessness, which will be examined through the Lukácsian framework of transcendental homelessness. The essay will then take up Lilian’s mirror image, in the figure of Louise and her literal foreignness, which will be mapped out through the Kristevan theorization of the modern subject as inherently self-estranged. The discussion will then complicate these understandings in terms of gender, arguing that there is a further layer of alienation for the specifically female subject. From this juncture of my argument, moving between a series of parallels and paradoxes within and between these novels, the essay will point to the ultimate radicality of Lilian and Louise’s movement away from what is understood as desirable, full, subjecthood. Rather, Grenville’s two heroines weave a complex new set of conditions in and out of pathologization, with its vexed (im)possibilities, which is, nonetheless, their only space of agency. In making this move, my essay is in some ways parallel to Ruth Barcan’s investigation of the Kristevan ‘abject’ as a framework for understanding the bodily and metaphorical crossing of the boundaries policed by the Law of the Father and patriarchal structures in Lilian’s Story.9 I hope to supplement Barcan’s important essay by providing further demonstrations of the ways in which these two novels by Grenville “invigorate critical tropes.”10 parison of Dreamhouse with Lilian’s Story. See Craven, “The Gothic Grenville, or Kate Makes Rhetoric,” Scripsi 6.3 (1990): 240. 8 Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, ed. Kate Grenville & Sue Woolfe (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993): 97. 9 Ruth Barcan, “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’: Bodies, Boundaries and Movement in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 29.2 (April 1998): 37. See reprint in the present volume, esp. 96–100 above. 10 Barcan, “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’,” 52.

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Georg Lukács identified the hero’s lack of a true ‘home’ as a defining condition of modernity. No longer motivated by transcendental destination, the hero is reduced to wandering.11 This is the terrain of Grenville’s first novel, which depicts a heroine who is paradigmatic of the transcendentally homeless figure of modernity.12 In this way, ironically enough, although she is the ‘outsider’, the outsider is the insider, the mainstream hero, in Lukács’s account of the modern novel.13 Crucially, however, this homelessness is not only a metaphorical condition for Lilian but becomes a literal one as well when she decides to live outside, as a homeless person on the streets. The female hero in Dreamhouse is also an overdetermined figure of the ‘outsider’, but here, this condition is not represented by the lack of a home, but by the temporary home of the foreigner. In Dreamhouse, Louise is not a homeless person like Lilian, but she has only a temporary ‘home’ in the crumbling farmhouse in Italy where she and Rennie are sojourning while he finishes his thesis. However, this farmhouse is not a ‘true’ home, either symbolically or literally, as it is not a permanent residence, nor is the couple’s relationship settled in the sense of providing a ‘home’ for both husband and wife. As a literal foreigner (the reader is never told explicitly whether Louise is English or Australian, but she is clearly ‘non-Italian’, as she does not speak the language), Louise appears to suffer the same alienation of internal self to outside world that the modern hero suffers due to ‘transcendental homelessness’. On the one hand, Louise is partly functioning as a subject who has successfully assimilated into society through the conventional female role of the beautiful, dutiful, wife. However, the narrative voice demonstrates that the ‘I’ of Louise’s violent fantasies is not the ‘I’ that the first-person narrator of Louise observes and describes in her outward behaviour. Louise’s foreignness throws into relief her homelessness within herself. Although Louise assimilates herself into normative femininity – she represses her desires, is beautiful like a model, obeys her husband even though her instinct is to disobey, performs the ideal duties of womanhood such as typing, despite hating it – she, 11

Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, tr. Anna Bostock (1916; Cambridge M A :

M I T Press, 1971). 12

Barcan describes the mind / body condition of Lilian, after she is raped, using words highly relevant to this essay. Barcan argues that “rape is […] psychologically cruel: women cannot be at home in their bodies” (my emphasis; “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’,” 34 (96 above). 13 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 88.

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like Lilian, is not ‘at home’ with herself but, rather, performs her role as if she were outside of herself.14 This is made clear in the opening paragraph: My husband was a vain man with a thick orange moustache who loved to look at his beautiful wife, slim like a model and striking on the streets. Look, people nudged each other. Look at her! He liked to see them nudge each other, and liked to watch me across tables or from the far side of a room, pleased with his thick orange moustache and his striking wife.15

Louise is a mute object here, an objectified woman. However, she is also looking at herself as the ‘subject’ of the narrative. She is an object to herself: as the ‘subject’ of her narrative, she is both object and subject, object being viewed and subject doing the viewing. She shifts between these positions of narrator and heroine, as seen in the shift in the pronouns from “her” to “me” and back again to “his striking wife” (1). Thus, in these opening lines the female narrator, Louise, is established as already ‘other to herself’, ‘outside of’ herself. Significantly, in neither position she occupies here is she seen in the private domain: she is either “on the streets,” or in what seems to be an equally ‘public’ interior in which strangers are looking at her. Viewed comparatively, then, Lilian’s dilemma accords with Lukács’s formulation of the alienated subject, whereas Louise experiences division on multiple levels. The misalignment between Louise’s inner world and her outer behaviour, and the ironic alignment between her inner world and the outer world of a foreign place, can be explained in terms of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theorization of the internal self and the role of foreignness. Drawing on Freud’s ‘uncanny’ and Lacan’s formulation of the Symbolic Order, the Law of the Father, Kristeva argues that the subject’s inherent sense of not being at home with himself is the underlying reason for the tension around ‘foreignness’ in modernity.16 In Kristeva’s schema, the ‘native’ experiences the foreigner as something ‘uncanny’: familiar yet unfamiliar, homely yet disturbing, oneself and yet not. In his uncanniness, the foreigner is thus a literalization of our own psyches, founded as they are on repression. As a result, “we are all strangers to ourselves,” says Kristeva.17 Further, she argues that this recognition of 14

Barcan, “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’,” 34; 96 above. Kate Grenville, Dreamhouse (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1986): 1. Further page references are in the main text. 16 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 8. 17 Strangers to Ourselves, 3. 15

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the potential for one’s own self to be viewed as ‘foreign’ provokes a spectrum of responses, including: fear and hatred of the foreigner out of denial or resentment of his involuntary exposure of the inherently self-estranged nature of all people; and recognition of the fundamental connection between Self and Other, in this universal similarity.18 Kristeva’s connection between ideas of nationality and foreignness is productive for the current discussion because it theorizes the relationship between literal estrangement and psychological and symbolic estrangement, between the experience of being or encountering a foreigner and the internal condition of the modern subject per se. We can see that, whereas Lilian is at least coherent to herself, self-unified, at home with herself, on the level of first-person narrator,19 Louise is overdeterminedly self-estranged. Where the disjunction in Lilian’s Story is that between the hero(ine) and her environment, the misalignment in Louise’s case is between the inner and outer domains of her own self: her submissive wifely manners versus her violent fantasies of slashing animal carcasses, trees, and people with knives, ripping off her husband’s moustache, and watching him being bitten by a poisonous snake (17, 31, 51). There is a further level of complication, however, to this comparative reading of Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse, for both theories of alienation presuppose a ‘full’, male, subject. It is precisely this subjectivity that is denied Lilian and Louise by their male intimates. In Lilian’s Story, this is enacted in the violent rape by Albion, who is enraged by his daughter’s failure to perform femininity on the bodily level, her refusal to defer sufficiently to his authority, and her attempts to acquire an all-encompassing ‘Shakespearean’ education on her own terms.20 All of these acts of self-determination are efforts by Lilian to achieve full subjecthood. The profundity of this attempt and the violence with which it is met are emblematically rehearsed by the primal nature

18

Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 8. Roslynn D. Haynes argues that because the “formal distinction between verbal and non-verbal thought” is broken down in Lilian’s Story, the novel “represents an interesting application of Jonathan Culler’s structuralist poetics […] insofar as Lilian, qua reader, becomes the interpreter, the custodian and even the embodiment of the Shakespearean text.” Haynes, “Fatalism and Feminism in the Fiction of Kate Grenville,” World Literature Written in English 31.1 (Spring 1991): 72. 20 Barcan, “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’,” 39 (105–106 above). See also Bill Ashcroft, “Madness and Power,” 67–69 above. 19

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of the rape scene.21 The rape (significantly occurring when her mother is literally ‘away from home’) is perpetrated when Lilian’s father finds her naked, literally looking at herself, her genitals, in front of the mirror. The scene aligns both sexuality, female gender, and her sense of self at the brink of constitution. Being sexually and violently violated at this key moment of transition causes Lilian to abandon her attempts to gain full subjecthood: My face was not my own and I did not want it examined by one who had been my mate. I did not belong to myself and could not give even my knee to Duncan […]. He was about to enter my skin through my face and knee. He could breathe too deeply and scatter me into fragments. Nothing was keeping me together now. (155–56)

This image of the breaking-apart of her coherent self, a de-cohering, shows the effect of the rape upon her psyche. In Dreamhouse, too, it is violent sexual violation that is the catalyst for Louise’s abandonment of the pursuit of normative subjectivity. Louise attempts to gain subjectivity not through self-determination as Lilian does, but through the ‘perfection’ of the normative role of beautiful wife. The adoption of these hypernormative roles does not protect her from further denigrating objectification, however. Rennie treats her as an object. Smugly content with Louise’s perfect outward performance of femininity, her beauty, her acceptance of the status of wife, and her consistent deferral to his authority, he performs only painful, anal penetrative sex upon her. Through her assimilation to a normative female identity, Louise gains female semi-subjectivity, but experiences this as a constant liminality in which her partly repressed desires continually try to surface. This return of the repressed finds a perfect figure in her relocation to a foreign place, and accounts for the uncanny atmosphere of gothic tropes, the mice, the snake, the birds, the crumbling house.22 As such, 21

Midalia argues for “the centrality – structurally, psychologically, politically – [of] the father’s rape of the daughter” in the operations of the novel (“Art for Woman’s Sake,” 258). 22 As Haynes argues, Louise and Rennie’s villa is not “unique. The Tuscan landscape abounds in such villas” (“Fatalism and Feminism in the Fiction of Kate Grenville,” 69). This entire environment is uncanny, familiar yet unfamiliar, homely yet disturbing. The operations of the uncanny as central to the gothic genre which Grenville is deploying in Dreamhouse has been theorized by numerous critics – for example, in Gothic Horror: A Guide For Students and Readers, ed. Clive Bloom (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd ed. 2007): 16.

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in opposite ways, both women are denied the agency and self-possession of full subjecthood. For both protagonists, then, their violent sexual domination by the men they trust results in overdetermined self-estrangement; in Lilian’s case this is enacted across the categories of literal homelessness and madness. Madness is the metaphorical space that Lilian inhabits, alongside the literal space of homelessness, as a response to the shattering of her sense of a coherent self. In Lilian’s Story, foreignness is aligned with two conditions that are both founded on a ‘taking leave of’: to be deliberately homeless or to refuse to stay in the home is to ‘take leave of’ the home, and the normative relationship to public/private domains. To be deliberately ‘mad’ or to refuse to behave ‘sanely’ is to ‘take leave of’ one’s senses. Thus, homelessness and madness are homologous for women, as critics have argued.23 Lilian performs this both literally and metaphorically, in that she permanently leaves the ‘idea’ of her ‘home,’ and all homes, where she can only ever be a slave, submissive, under the Law of her Father, to live outside, and she also “takes leave of” ‘sense’ as it is inscribed by the Symbolic Order in language and proper use of grammatical relationships to create authorized patriarchal meaning. The choice to remain ‘outside’ of the home and outside of the Symbolic Order are viewed as self-reflexively ‘othering’ by society: because Lilian refuses to remain at home, she must be ‘mad’, and because she is ‘mad’, she becomes homeless. The nexus between madness, sickness, and the home is regarded by feminist theorists as fundamental to representations of female subjectivity. As Susan J. Schenk argues in relation to late-twentieth-century American novels about domesticity, it is the woman’s refusal to conform to social expectations of femaleness and domesticity that provoke the diagnosis of ‘madness’ from male health experts: In the ‘mad housewife’ novel, then, the female role itself is analyzed as a potentially ‘sick’ role, while at the same time the ‘sickness’ of women’s rejection of this traditional role is explored.24 23

The tendency to regard as ‘not-sane’ women who will not stay literally within the home is the subject of one of the most famous novels of the last thirty years, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. On the relationship between homelessness and socially acceptable female identity in this novel, see Anne–Marie Mallon, “Sojourning Women: Homelessness and Transcendence in Housekeeping,” Critique (Winter 1989): 95–105. 24 Susan J. Schenk, “Protest or Pathology: The Politics of Madness in Contemporary Domestic Fiction,” Women’s Studies 21 (1992): 233.

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Those authorized to name women as ‘mad’ or ‘sick’ are the husbands, fathers, and doctors who police the Symbolic Order and whose function is to maintain the state and its understanding of a normative citizen. Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse are both examples of such ‘mad housewife’ novels, in the ways in which they examine the explicit ‘madness’ and sexual perversity (‘sickness’) of their heroines. At the same time, as Schenk suggests of the genre, Grenville’s novels also expose the structures that create conventional female roles that can themselves be considered ‘sick’. The structure of both novels, then, is the female protagonist’s movement towards and then away from the trajectory of self-development and into madness and sickness. Ironically, it is precisely these gendered pathologies that give Lilian and Louise access to the full subject-positions implied in the novelistic categories of the homeless and foreign subject. Contingent access gives them something, but just as their access to it is partial, so is what it bestows on them. Between them, the two heroines explore the realm of what it is possible to achieve from such an ambivalent position. Louise achieves the alignment of inner world with outer behaviour, and the sanctioning of her behaviour by a similarly focused society. Lilian achieves personal dignity and a sense of a coherent self. Both remain homeless and foreign. Lilian’s failure to adopt normative domestic roles leads her father to, first, rape her and, then, pathologize her as mad and commit her to an insane asylum. Her response to being forcibly made to accept a mental asylum as ‘home’ is (after Aunt Kitty finally gets her out) to choose to never live inside a house again. While it is a ‘choice’ of sorts, then, it is also a position she is forced into by the Symbolic Order’s refusal to allow her to speak as a subject, for if she spoke, it would be to tell of the abuse by her father. As Susan Midalia and Gerry Turcotte have demonstrated separately and extensively, Lilian’s attempts to tell people about having been raped by her father are failed attempts: language, structured according to the Law of the Father, will not allow her the speaking position to articulate this abuse (indeed, for Turcotte “the prevailing theme of [Grenville’s] work is the quest to survive silencing”25). Through the language of ‘madness’, Lilian turns her (self)enforced homelessness into a foreignness that gives her access to a contingent coherency. Kristeva explicitly connects the image of the silenced (non-native) speaker to the female gender, and to a dysfunctional, ‘mad’, female: 25

Turcotte, “ ‘ The Ultimate Oppression’: Discourse Politics in Kate Grenville’s Fiction,” World Literature Written in English 29.1 (Spring 1989): 64.

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it is the silence that empties the mind and fills the brain with despondency, like the gaze of sorrowful women coiled up in some nonexistent eternity. (16)

From this position, however, if this figure rejects silence, she can opt for speaking as a foreigner. The foreigner’s speech is, Kristeva argues, characterized by rhetoric and formality: The foreigner’s speech can bank only on its bare rhetorical strength, and the inherent desires he or she has invested in it. But it is deprived of any support in outside reality, since the foreigner is precisely kept out of [that reality]. Under such conditions, if it does not founder into silence, it becomes absolute in its formalism, excessive in its sophistication – rhetoric is dominant, the foreigner is a baroque person. (21)

This description equally applies to the homeless mad person, who has no “social connections,” whose speech has no “social value,” potentially “fascinating […] on account of its very strangeness,” that will be listened to “only in absent-minded, amused fashion,” and ignored and forgotten “in order to go on with serious matters.”26 Nevertheless, the speech of the foreigner is not silence; it is an articulation of sorts. On the level of narrative, Lilian’s mad speech provides an alternative inverted access to the category of foreignness, one that, in its inextricability from the female (or non-male), bypasses the male subjecthood that is the source of tyranny. Lilian’s declaiming of Shakespeare serves to put into question the very categories of madness and sickness through which non-conforming women are excluded. As a symbol, Shakespeare functions across madness and foreignness: the works of Shakespeare are known to be quoted by the mad, and his plays are also familiar in the trope of the ‘foreigner doing Shakespeare’, represented to English speakers as a fundamental text of the Imperial West and a legacy of colonialism. As Lilian speaks the words of Shakespeare across her life from childhood to adulthood, the text shows the lines that connect the sane to the mad and the native to the foreigner, the ‘strange’ daughter who nevertheless belongs in her family, to the adult madwoman ‘homeless’ on the streets of Sydney. Gerry Turcotte argues that Lilian “has taken the bard’s words and stripped them of their codes and referents and has replaced them with her own systems of codification.”27 Lilian’s madness is her access to foreignness. Once she is homeless, quoting

26 27

Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 21. Turcotte, “ ‘ The Ultimate Oppression’,” 77.

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Shakespeare on the streets, she has become visibly and performatively ‘foreign’ to the hegemony. The ‘sane’ citizen can never be a foreigner, and because she is within her own country she cannot be a literal foreigner, but madness renders her language and behaviour ‘foreign’. Just as a tourist in a foreign country has no private car but takes a taxi or bus ride through the streets of the city, Lilian’s last journey is a taxi ride through her past as a homeless woman of the streets. Through a line from madness to foreignness, she achieves a distance from her self, her own history, that allows her to overcome the shattering of her self caused by rape and institutionalization, and view her past and her self as coherent. Louise’s response to the sexual trauma of Rennie’s use of her body is the same movement as Lilian’s – away from full subjecthood – and it is enacted not in her use of language, but in the polymorphous perversity of her fantasies. In a further difference between the experiences of Lilian and Louise, these fantasies are received by the social environment not as something foreign but as something familiar. In Louise’s case, the very inception of the narrative, which chronologically follows the ‘first’ act of sodomy by Rennie (as it is implied, when first described, that this has been their established pattern of sexual activity since their wedding), ushers in and instates Louise’s multiple ‘foreignness’: her about-to-be-a-literal-foreigner and her psychological self-division, her taking of herself as an object of observation at a distance. In an inverse response from that in which society responds to Lilian’s behaviour, and literal madness, as its metaphorically foreign other, Louise’s regression from full subjectivity and its correlate, adult genital sexuality, is mirrored and encouraged by the outside, foreign, environment. Although her sexual treatment by Rennie “involv[es] a further erasing of the female identity,” the space of the foreign, as uncanny as it is, offers Louise an alternative to the search for the same subjecthood that dominates her.28 This is where the surreal, dreamlike, inverted or foreign condition of the sojourn becomes crucial: the alignment between knowledge, power, and respect as an ‘adult’ and ‘citizen’ who belongs, and the developmental stages of sexuality, are inverted.29 In her heterosexual marriage and seemingly ‘ideal’

28

Haynes, “Fatalism and Feminism in the Fiction of Kate Grenville,” 62. Haynes gestures towards this idea. She argues that “in a novel where illicit relationships are the norm and where traditional marriage is represented by the ridiculous wedding group outside Milan Cathedral […], the conventional becomes the anomaly” 29

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setup with Rennie, she is perversely viewed as ‘innocent’ and ‘naive’ by Hugo, Viola, and Daniel. In the world of these ‘natives’, adult subjectivity and power are, in Freudian terms, aligned with infantile, pre-adult sexuality: incest, homosexuality, fascination with bodily fluids, oral and anal sexuality, cruelty.30 What is conventionally considered true adult sexuality, the genital stage, is for Louise a farce evacuated of desire and sexuality, in that Rennie’s business-like enactment of sodomy is slightly perverted but entirely narcissistic, and does not allow any pleasure for Louise, only pain. It functions to both attest to and conceal his homosexual desires, enacted as it is within the parameters of a heterosexual marriage. This heterosexuality is aligned with the couple’s foreignness in Tuscany, their naivety in their initial conversation with Hugo and Viola, in which Rennie’s insistence on transparent adult conversation is mercilessly twisted by the brother and sister into a series of tests or traps for Rennie and Louise to fall into (39). Louise, however, is aware of the dynamic, precisely because she has such fantasies herself, to which the reader has already been privy. Sharing an ambiguous pleasure/ suffering with Viola and Hugo, and knowing at least that there are rules in operation that she does not know, she is attentive to these games and tries to understand their rules; she is really pleased when she finally works out how to ‘play the game’ with Viola and Hugo and Daniel, of ‘sharing’ her husband: Daniel gave me a glittering smile. – Hope you won’t mind me stealing him for the night. Of course you’ll have Viola. Viola and Daniel both watched me closely and I felt as exhilarated as someone successfully speaking another language for the first time. – Fine. Sounds fine with me. (107)

Here, Louise explicitly connects her status as an ‘outsider’ in sexual terms to being a literal foreigner who cannot speak the native language. Her exhilaration results from her finally ‘belonging’ by knowingly entering into the sexual subtext of the conversation, which is likened to success in speaking the local

(“Fatalism and Feminism in the Fiction of Kate Grenville,” 71). However, the focus of Haynes’s argument lies elsewhere. 30 Sigmund Freud, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7: On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, tr. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953): 88–126.

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language. The “polymorphous perversity”31 of the natives presented to Louise – Hugo and Viola, Daniel and Domenico – involves incest, masturbation, urination, bestiality, and torture. These are mirrored by Louise’s own “impressive array of female sexual fantasies.”32 In the relationship with Rennie she is a foreigner to herself, because she is internally divided, watching herself as the mute object of Rennie’s pride, while another self either closer or further away seethes with violent, erotic, and / or sexual desires that can never be acted on and are never given space for expression. In moving from Rennie to Viola and Hugo, Louise moves towards her own desires. Once her desires and her modes of behaviour as she narrates them are merged, she is no longer internally divided, and world and self align. Becoming a literal foreigner through the mode of ‘sickness’ allows her to find a metaphorical home and articulate a coherent self of a kind. The heroines of both Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse, then, move away from full subjecthood in ways that are commonly pathologized as non-normative, ‘mad’, or ‘sick’. Lilian, as I have argued, expresses this in the language of madness, while Louise would be classified as sexually ‘deviant’ or perverted. Neither response to the self-estrangement is a utopic one, however. The reader cannot help but be sceptical about the enjoyment Louise will find with Viola and Hugo, precisely because it is based on the childishness that characterizes the oral and anal stages of sexuality, and on the disturbing literalization of incestuous and abusive desires. Similarly, the awful sadness of Lilian’s alienation is made palpable in the novel. As Pam Gilbert argues, although Lilian “has managed to achieve a legendary status: a grandeur and greatness

31

‘The polymorphous perverse’ is Freud’s term for a range of perverse sexual activities from the anal and oral stage of erotic development. Freud does not shy away from the prevalence of perverse sexual behaviour among the population, arguing instead that its popularity suggests that it is inherent to sexuality: “it becomes impossible not to recognize that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic” (Freud, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7: 109). However, for the purposes of my argument, the importance of Louise’s polymorphous perversity is in its metaphoric correlation with the imaginary stage of development in relation to the Law of the Father, the phallus, and authority in language through the Symbolic Order – Lacan’s reading of Freud as conditions of need, demand, and desire relative to the individual’s position in the Symbolic Order. 32 Midalia, “Art for Woman’s Sake,” 3.

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symbolically linked with her fatness,”33 there are nevertheless “price tags on ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’ and Lil has discovered them. They are too costly for women.”34 While not utopic, both heroines paradoxically achieve a form of agency in the abandonment of the full subjecthood of the Symbolic. Louise’s location of a ‘home’ in the temporary sojourn is enacted on the narratological level through language, in the use of the personal pronoun: the ‘I’ of the narrator rejoins the ‘I’ of the protagonist being observed, when she says: “Dear Viola […] I am coming back. There was nothing more I could think of that needed to be said” (170). There is no longer a divided consciousness and divided narrative: the desires /urges of Louise have merged with the narrating consciousness. Mirroring this scene, and balancing Grenville’s equation, is Lilian’s taxi-ride return to the site of her literal homelessness and metaphorical belonging, to which she says: “I’m ready for whatever comes next.”35 Thus, the narrator articulates a sense of cohesion with and connection to the narrative environment, control over her relationship to her environment, suggesting, like Louise, a no longer divided consciousness, and signalling the end of narrative. Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse are indeed “two sides of an equation.”36 The two novels are “mirror image[s]”37 of one another, reflecting women who have the same dissatisfaction with their expected social and psycho-sexual positions. The women take opposite trajectories towards what they hope will be self-determining identity. Both are violently blocked by the sexual exploitation of them by men who refuse to acknowledge their subjectivity. Both choose to abandon the struggle for full (male) subjecthood, and both find that it is paradoxically through the very sites of their oppression that they work towards contingent self-articulation. Ultimately, for Lilian this means use of the language of madness, and through it inhabitation of the social category of ‘homelessness’, and for Louise, polymorphous perversity and acceptance of the category of ‘foreignness.’ For both, it means that they achieve a kind of self-determination, an ability to use the prohibited ‘I’, with which they can finalize their narratives of struggle. 33

Pam Gilbert, Coming Out From Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988): 41. 34 Gilbert, Coming Out From Under, 42. 35 Kate Grenville, Lilian’s Story (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1985): 280. 36 Grenville & Woolfe, Making Stories, 97. 37 Making Stories, 97.

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WORKS CITED Barcan, Ruth. “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’: Bodies, Boundaries and Movement in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 29.2 (April 1998): 31–55. Also in the present volume (93–117). Barthes, Roland. “Pierre Loti: Aziyadé,” in New Critical Essays, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980): 105–21. Bird, Delys. “New Narrations: Contemporary Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Webby (Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 2000): 183–208. Bloom, Clive. “Death’s Own Backyard: The Nature of Gothic and Horror Fiction,” in Gothic Horror: A Guide For Students and Readers, ed. Clive Bloom (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd ed. 2007): 1–24. Craven, Peter. “The Gothic Grenville, or Kate Makes Rhetoric,” Scripsi 6.3 (1990): 238–58. Freud, Sigmund. The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7: On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, tr. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953). Gelder, Ken, & Paul Salzman. The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–88 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989). Gilbert, Pam. Coming Out From Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988). Grenville, Kate. Dreamhouse (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1986). ——. Lilian’s Story (St Leonards N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1985). Grenville, Kate, & Sue Woolfe. Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993). Haynes, Roslynn D. “Fatalism and Feminism in the Fiction of Kate Grenville,” World Literature Written in English 31.1 (Spring 1991): 60–79. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Étrangers à nous-mêmes, 1988; New York: Columbia U P , 1991). Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel, tr. Anna Bostock (1916; Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1971). Mallon, Anne–Marie. “Sojourning Women: Homelessness and Transcendence in Housekeeping,” Critique (Winter 1989): 95–105. Midalia, Susan. “Art for Woman’s Sake: Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story as Female Bildungsroman,” in Constructing Gender: Feminism in Literary Studies, ed. Hilary Fraser & R.S. White (Nedlands, W A : U of Western Australia P, 1994): 253–68. ——. “Re-Writing Woman: Genre Politics and Female Identity in Kate Grenville’s Dreamhouse,” Australian Literary Studies 16.1 (May 1993): 30–38. Schenk, Susan J. “Protest or Pathology: The Politics of Madness in Contemporary Domestic Fiction,” Women’s Studies 21 (1992): 231–41.

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Thompson, Veronica. “You Are What You Eat: Women, Eating and Identity in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Scent of Eucalyptus,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 27.4 (October 1996): 129– 37. Turcotte, Gerry. “ ‘ The Ultimate Oppression’: Discourse Politics in Kate Grenville’s Fiction,” World Literature Written in English 29.1 (Spring 1989): 64–85.

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“Impossible Speech” and the Burden of Translation Lilian’s Story from Page to Screen

—— A LICE H EALY

I

‘ L I F E N A R R A T I V E ’ which moves from birth to old age, the narrator of Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story offers an idea of history that exists in a reinvention of personal and collective memory through the minute observation of everyday life. At the end of a life which sees Lilian suffer the marginality of being a ‘fat’ and ‘intelligent’ girl in a post-Victorian society, Lilian defiantly rewrites – or re-stages – personal history through her street-side recitations of Shakespeare and subversions of a middle-class lady’s behaviour. She claims, “I have never cultivated the burden of memory.” This essay extends Lilian’s suggestion in order to problematize the ‘burden of translation’ and its significance for recent ideas of history as performance, variously applied by writers from Greg Dening to Judith Butler. In Lilian’s words: N HER WITTY

History is not the past, but the present made flesh. I saw more, as I became older, fatter, more easily tired. Look, I told myself, moving up William Street, and when I looked around I saw the window of an abandoned brothel, that was broken in the shape of a map of Australia. Look […] Listen, I told myself, this is history.1

The insistence on ‘presentness’ in Lilian’s words carries the weight of the ‘burden of translation’: what is not said; what resonates; what is disconnected from the moment of speech. Those words reflect not only the observation of

1

Kate Grenville, Lilian’s Story (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1985): 253. Further page references are in the main text.

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seemingly insignificant detail in everyday life but also a reframing of history through the virtual gaze of a constantly moving subject “walking in the city,” to use Michel de Certeau’s metaphor.2 Kate Grenville’s Lilian is given a personal history: a childhood in a strict middle-class family with an abusive father, a university education in the shadow of emerging feminisms, and a period in an institution. The key aspect of this story is her birth date, which coincides with the year of Federation and the end of the Victorian era. Grenville reconceptualizes Federation as a germinal (rather than seminal) event in Australia’s history through associating it with Lilian’s birth. While her family’s society still publicly enforces Victorian ideas of gender and morality, the feminist presence of Lilian signifies “the old world translated.”3 Like Joan in Grenville’s Joan Makes History (1988), Lilian is an everywoman figure in an allegory of Australian ‘herstory’. The reception of Lilian’s Story also signifies practices of framing and interpretation. The novel garnered attention in literary circles by winning the national Australian /Vogel Literary Award in 1984.4 A screen adaptation was directed by Jerzy Domaradzki (and his collaborators) and released in 1995. The differences between novel and film are perhaps symptomatic of the historical moment in which they were made, as well as the artistic, historical, and political concerns of each storyteller.5 Whereas Domaradzki’s film focuses on

2

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P, 1988). 3 In the second of his Boyer Lectures, Malouf remarks: “We speak of these places we belong to as new worlds, but what they really are is the old world translated: translated with all that word implies of re-interpretation and change, not simply transported. Our ways of thinking and feeling and doing were developed and tested over many centuries before we brought them to this new place, and gave them a different turn of meaning, different associations, a different shape and weight and colour, on new ground.” See Malouf, “A Spirit of Play: The Making of an Australian Consciousness,” AVC Radio National Boyer Lecture 1998, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyers/98boyer1 .htm 4 Mark Thornton, “Lilian’s Story Part of New Wave,” Canberra Times (19 June 1994): 22. 5 Although the film of Lilian’s Story is discussed as the director Jerzy Domaradzki’s work, it is important to remember that film is a collaborative art-form. However, it is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the contributions of every key artist (screenwriter, cinematographer, set designer, composer and others) in depth. Discussion of

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madness and the public life of a famous eccentric, Grenville’s novel sets Lilian’s life against a background of social, political, and historical change in Australia dating from Federation to the 1960s, when the suffragette movement shifted social boundaries for women. It therefore reflects the shifting cultural spaces of Australian society, when political structures were starting to break off from direct parental relationship with England and the people were beginning to acknowledge difference and independence. Some critics have suggested that the oppressive relationship that Lilian endures with her father Albion is symptomatic of a similar relationship between Australia and England.6 The figure of Lilian thus becomes allegorical of Australia’s adolescence in her transgressive recitation of English ‘scripts’. Lilian’s refusal to stand up for the British national anthem in the cinema during World War Two is an example of her irreverence for such oppressive structures (176). As Ruth Barcan suggests, Lilian’s rewriting of the official passages of the city is paralleled with her use of Shakespeare as an “instrument of rebellion against patriarchy and convention.”7 This essay examines the translation from novel to film, and its significance to ideas of the ‘re-staging’ of history through performance. It applies Judith Butler’s theory of ‘excitable speech’ – her suggestion that language is alive when it “refuses to ‘encapsulate’ or ‘capture’ the events and lives it describes.”8 Lilian’s street-side recitations of Shakespeare re-inscribe a literature firmly lodged in patriarchal English values, investing it with feminist subjectivity. Her performances are insurgent acts of translation, and it is often when she is ‘moving’ through the city that she remodels her “William” in her own voice.

Lilian’s Story as Textual Series Practices of translation in this instance are revealed in two relationships: the renegotiation of personal history from father to daughter, and the textual ‘Domaradzki’s film’, therefore, presupposes the director as the central artist while acknowledging the important collaborations of other artists. 6 Mark Naglazas, “Poles Alike in Fine Film Treatments,” West Australian (1 May 1996), Today: 5. 7 Ruth Barcan, “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’: Bodies, Boundaries and Movement in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 29.2 (1998): 44. Also in the present volume (106 above). 8 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997): 8–9.

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series represented in the adaptation of novel to film. The notion of cultural translation offers a useful paradigm to consider both relationships. It serves to mobilize acts of speaking, telling, reading, and performing as unstable sites of meaning. Homi K. Bhabha (among others) insists that translation is an insurgent act, or a process replete with political tensions, contradictions, instabilities. It exists in the space which he calls the “interstices” – “the performativity of cultural translation as the staging of cultural difference.”9 Resurrecting the philosophical ideas of Heidegger, Bhabha also locates the border as the boundary where “presencing begins.”10 This is the location at which contemporary subjectivities, echoing voices of the colonized, the repressed, of minorities, refugees, and others can speak through the ‘silences’ in between conventional, nationalistic, and homogeneous structures.11 Bhabha uses Salman Rushdie’s term the “migrant’s double-vision” to identify the virtual sites from which these subjectivities can perform.12 Translation, he suggests, is a process which implies transition: Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (énoncé, or propositionality). And the sign of translation continually tells, or “tolls” the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices. The “time” of translation consists in that movement of meaning, the principle and practice of a communication that, in the words of [Paul] de Man, “puts the original in motion to decanonise it,” giving it the movement of fragmentation, a wandering of errance, a kind of permanent exile.13

Lilian’s mobile speech acts represent such shifts in meaning between the “cultural authority” of her father and the “performative practices” inscribed by gender codes. In short, hers is a true “wandering of errance,” the fragmented subjectivity of a supposedly ‘mad’ woman. As part of a textual series, Lilian’s Story follows its own twists and turns, so that any notion of an ‘original’ becomes redundant. It has been translated from the real life of Bea Miles to folk legend, to a symbol of the vitality and

9

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 227. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1. 11 The Location of Culture, 227. 12 The Location of Culture, 5. 13 The Location of Culture, 228. 10

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struggles of a city in a certain era. The novel based on this life teases out the social and historical questions behind this popular memory – questions of feminist history and Australia’s political independence. Grenville’s prequel to Lilian’s Story, Dark Places (1994), is told in the misogynist voice of Lilian’s abusive father, Albion, and explains the history of patriarchal ideas in Victorian Australia. This novel’s appearance after the publication of Lilian’s Story fractures any prior reading of Lilian’s first-person narrative. Domaradzki’s film of Lilian’s Story was released a year later, in 1995, and eliminates the novel’s specific historical background. The film dramatizes questions of memory, independence, and psychological freedom but frames them in more existential terms, reflecting a Polish-Australian filmmaker’s concerns – in Rushdie’s phrase, a “migrant’s double-vision.” Domaradzki’s cinematic translation needs to be explained in two contexts: the concerns of Australian cinema at the time; and the cultural background of the filmmaker. In the wake of what journalists termed the ‘new wave’, the darker films of the late 1990s used a very different aesthetic from the sunbleached vistas of the ‘A F C genre’ or the ‘glitter cycle’ comedies of the early 1990s.14 The film of Lilian’s Story reflected this different aesthetic. Commentators also pointed to the shift in thematic concerns of Australian cinema in the mid-to-late 1990s. Lilian’s Story was one of many films which explored the theme of madness and old age – films such as Cosi (1996), Shine (1996), Angel Baby (1995), and Bad Boy Bubby (1994). Lynden Barber suggests that audiences and producers had come to accept confronting subjects after the success of the New Zealander Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table in 1990.15 Margot Nash, the director of Vacant Possession, commented that the trend towards thoughtful, serious films in the mid-1990s was the result of a 14

The ‘A F C genre’ was first defined by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, in their influential two-volume book The Screening of Australia, to categorize the pastoral screen dramas of the 1970s Australian film ‘renaissance’. The term ‘glitter cycle’ was also used to categorize the three eccentric comedies (Strictly Ballroom, 1992; Muriel’s Wedding, 1994; and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, 1994) that reiterated and reformed the ‘popular’ with an ‘Australian identity’. Emily Rustin has argued that the ‘glitter cycle’ undermined the Australian (cinematic) imaginary, variously described by Graeme Turner, Russel Ward, and John Tulloch as being characterized by the heterosexual male hero battling an unconquerable landscape and society; see her “Romance and Sensation in the ‘Glitter Cycle’,” in Australian Cinema in the 1990s, ed. Ian Craven (London: Frank Cass, 2001): 133–48. 15 Lynden Barber, “A Healthy Madness,” Weekend Australian (20 April 1996): 12.

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reflexive Australian self-image: “being a little lost and trying to understand where we are at the end of the century.”16 Lilian’s Story also reflects the subjectivity of a migrant filmmaker. Jerzy Domaradzki is a Ukraine-born filmmaker trained in the national odz film school in Poland. His earlier film Struck by Lightning (1990) was produced after a residency at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in 1987.17 Yet it is Lilian’s Story that more reflects the cinema of socialist Poland prior to its present democratic, free-market society. Some of Domaradzki’s Polish contemporaries were filmmakers, such as Krzystof Kiesowski, Roman Polanski, and Andrzej Wajda, all of whom were known for sombre, sparely rendered films that represented the nation’s consciousness and visions. In the 1980s, Domaradzki and his contemporaries worked under the visionary umbrella of the ‘Cinema of Moral Concern’. As Alexandra Sosnowski suggests, postwar Polish cinema before the 1980s was concerned with “the cinematic analysis of social problems.” Australian cinema inherited this particular aesthetic in Lilian’s Story, and in such a way as to fit it to a third stratum of Polish cinema, the “psychological path,” which “turned the camera inward, focusing on the private workings of the self.”18 Furthermore, this Polish aesthetic is symptomatic of Domaradzki’s training in Polish socialist art, where filmmakers were “expected to convey a message, but their works had to be ambitious, complex, and artistically sophisticated.”19 As Peter Galvin suggests, Domaradzki’s directorial style is “consciously poetic, from the rigid stylized performances to the many short wordless scenes, to the theatrical gesture of casting one actor in several roles.”20 Thus, Sydney is seen through fresh eyes, as Ruth Cracknell (who plays Lilian in Domaradzki’s cinematic translation of the novel) suggests: “He brought new eyes to Sydney. I found I was rediscovering the place.”21 Domaradzki’s cine16

Quoted in Michael Fitzgerald. “Truly, Madly – Cosi,” Time (1 April 1996): 65. Keith Connolly, “Lilian Reveals Echoes of Lodz,” The Sunday Age (12 May 1996), Agenda: 7. 18 Alexandra Sosnowski, “Cinema in Transition: The Polish Film Today,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 24.1 (Spring 1996): 14. 19 Sosnowski, “Cinema in Transition,” 16. 20 Peter Galvin, “Psychology Sinks in Grim Shadows of Sydney Gothic,” Sydney Morning Herald (9 May 1996): 16. 21 Quoted in Helen Crompton, “Her Own Worst Critic,” West Australian (15 May 1996), Today: 3. 17

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matographer, fellow Pole Slawomir Idziak, presents us with an unconventional series of images of the city, far removed from the harsh sunlight depicted in classical Australian cinema or the major icons presented in tourist films and advertising.22 Thus, in the opening sequence, Sydney is shown as though through Lilian’s eyes as she peers out of a moving taxi. The camera tracks across grass areas and then captures the boldly lit skyscrapers of the city at night. It could be any city, yet the visual language of the filmmakers is unmistakably European. Domaradzki’s European art-film style in Lilian’s Story reflects the transplantation of the cinematic language of his homeland (an aesthetic frozen in the moment he left pre-Solidarity Poland) into a film rooted firmly in the collective memory of Australian society, specifically Sydney people of earlier generations. It is evidence of the migrancy of ideas, languages, techniques, and frameworks. Domaradzki and his screenwriter Steve Wright chose to release Lilian from the institution when she is an old woman and set the central narrative in the present (the 1990s). Social and feminist history, as we read it in Grenville’s novel, is abstracted to psychological history.

Performing Memory In both the novel and the film of Lilian’s Story, the operation of memory is symbolized most strongly by Lilian’s capacity to hold all of the words of William Shakespeare in her head, signifying Lilian’s ownership or domestication of ‘fragments’ of the Bard’s magisterial texts. Lilian’s feminist play with Shakespeare’s celebrated work subverts the patriarchal, humanist system which tries to repress her. In her later years, she takes speeches out of context, moulding them to suit her eccentric observations of everyday life, giving them personal significance. She recites Shakespeare’s poetry in brazen, grotesque ways. In her earlier years, Lilian’s recitations signify a tension between the ‘romantic’ desires of a teenage girl and the need for her father’s approval on her terms. In the film, Lilian recites the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet as a play of courtship with her “beau” F.J. Stroud as they sit under an upturned boat on the foreshore. In the novel, Lilian is ambivalent about the attentions of F.J. Stroud. As a young man, he is not privy to Lilian’s recitations. Instead, Lilian recites Shakespeare to her friend Duncan in the mistaken belief that there is romantic potential between them. Duncan, a crude but 22

Galvin, “Psychology Sinks,” 16.

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wealthy country boy, does not understand her recitations, yet plays along when she quotes a passage from a courtship dialogue between Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest: I do not know one of my sex! No woman’s face remember, save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen more that I may call men, than you, good friend, and my dear father. (116)

Lilian’s recitation connotes her desire for ‘recognition’ to be returned by her father and her friend Duncan. Yet neither man can perceive Lilian beyond given gender codes. In the novel and the film, Albion suspects Lilian of sexual promiscuity when he encounters her reciting Shakespeare to Duncan / Stroud on the beach. In reaction, he throws Lilian’s book into the harbour. It is Albion’s attempt to control her subversive acts by destroying an earlier sign of his paternal love – the gift of Shakespeare. However, Lilian is innocent of any sexual deviance and resists her father’s attempts to silence her. In the novel, she remarks that she has memorized the words anyway, and has no use for the book (122). In the film, chosen extracts from Shakespeare also represent such brazen acts of defiance. For example, before Albion’s destruction of the book, Lilian recites Cordelia’s famous words from the opening scene of King Lear, where Cordelia refuses to employ sycophantic speech as the token of her allegiance to her father. Such scenes exemplify Grenville’s preoccupation with the father–daughter relationships of King Lear and The Tempest. This wilful transformation of Shakespeare’s texts is heightened in the figurative strategy of the grotesque in the film, especially in her performances on the street after her father’s death. By indulging in what her society designates as eccentricity or ‘madness’, Lilian is freed from the social expectations of her class and gender previously imposed in her post-Victorian childhood. She uses streets, parks, buses, and taxis as stages for her bawdy performances, teaching the crowd her wisdom. They are all transitional sites, where people are moving from one place to another. Thus Lilian’s speech acts can be seen as examples of Judith Butler’s theory of the socially transformative power of unconventional performances of ‘conventional’ texts: “Impossible speech” would be precisely the ramblings of the asocial, the rantings of the “psychotic” that the rules that govern the domain of speakability produce, and by which they are continually haunted.23

23

Butler, Excitable Speech, 133.

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In “Excitable Speech,” Butler re-contextualizes J.L. Austin’s theories of the speech act through a study of hate speech and its construction in legal discourse. She refers to the institutions that prescribe ways of speaking and define limits of acceptable ‘public’ behaviour. Hence, the ‘rantings’ of an old Lilian are speech acts that spill over the “domain of speakability” coded in her society. Lilian is aware of her place in other people’s histories, and that a speech act can have an effect beyond “the moment it occasions.”24 Her recitations of “her William” therefore represent creative strategies of resistance – what Tejaswini Niranjana calls that “translative practice between interpretation and reading, carrying a disruptive force much greater than the other two.”25 Her speech acts restage history, rewrite the lived experience of the city, and translate Shakespeare’s words from the page to collective memory. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau also points to the disruption of dominant systems by common people. Through the model of the speech act, he describes how people “escape” domination without leaving the society through the modification of official languages.26 In the novel, Lilian claims the importance of performance over language when she says “any tale is real if it is told well enough” (112).

Re-Staging Gender Lilian’s unruly speech acts are not only defiant appropriations of the Shakespearian canon. They are also attempts to speak back to her father’s violent misogyny and society’s designation of Lilian as a “failed” woman. Her eccentric performances enact the frightened silences of her own lived experience. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that the enactment of gender is defined by normative standards set by hegemonic practices. Grenville’s description of the art and manners of a “young lady,” defined and reiterated by Lilian’s mother and the “yellow-stockinged” girls at tennis parties, embodies such notions. Because of physical size and intelligence, Lilian fails to measure up to such social norms. Yet Butler’s theory opens up the possibility for subjects to subvert such codes – Lilian doesn’t play the young lady, “daughter of a gentleman,” in the proper manner (92). Yet she does find a way to re24

Butler, Excitable Speech, 14. Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992): 186. 26 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 25

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invent her own subjectivity through distorted reiteration. This is epitomized by the overbearing presence of her large body. Vicky Roach describes Lilian as “a woman too big for the space allowed her, a character constantly spilling over her boundaries.”27 Roach notes that the filmmakers relied on the actor Ruth Cracknell’s “imposing presence” to interpret this aspect of Grenville’s creation. Yet Cracknell is a lean woman, and such casting could be seen as a move away from Grenville’s comment on how Lilian, as a physically large woman unashamed of her sexuality, transcends the limits of a Victorian lady’s behaviour. Cracknell’s earlier performances, such as Maggie from Mother and Son on Australian television, are echoed in the innocence and eccentricity of her portrayal of Lilian. Those prior performances undoubtedly influenced the audience’s reading of the film; and such an intertextual reference to subversive, difficult characters translates Lilian’s physical proportions into what Kathleen Rowe terms an “unruly woman.” Lilian (in both novel and film) fits several of Rowe’s criteria: she is physically large (in the novel); she is “unwilling to confine herself to her proper place”; she is an old woman; she is a comedic figure; she lives on the streets and is thus associated with borders and thresholds; she is accused (wrongly) of sexual deviance; and her speech is “excessive” (31). Like Butler, Rowe argues that the signifiers of an “unruly woman” are “coded with misogyny” but are also a “potential source of power.”28 In Grenville’s novel, Lilian’s marginal relation to normative gender identities is also signified by the absence of any ‘desirable’ female community. Instead, eccentric women influence Lilian’s concept of her body, her worth as an intelligent girl, and her place in other people’s memories. The film excludes many of these female characters, eliminating the strong feminist presence that underscores the historical milieu of the novel. The character of Joan is the most powerful omission and significantly weakens the film’s representation of Lilian’s unashamed sexuality on the streets in her old age. Joan is Lilian’s university friend, the daughter of Eastern European migrants. She is not from the society of “graceful” young ladies of English descent found at Lilian’s tennis parties, debutantes with “tidy smiles” and “tidy futures” (90). 27

Vicky Roach, “To Bea or Not to Bea – An Uneasy Blend,” Daily Telegraph (Sydney; 9 May 1996): 39. 28 Kathleen Rowe, “Pig Ladies, and Ladies with Big Mouths: Feminism and the Carnivalesque,” in The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: U of Texas P, 1995): 31.

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Joan, like Lilian’s neighbour Miss Gash, offers her the possibility of alternative feminine identities. She teaches Lilian to possess and invent her destiny outside the “tidy futures” inscribed by her family’s society (114). In the film, only Aunt Kitty, the prostitutes, and the female inmates in the institution for the mentally ill remain. Those characters serve to ensure Lilian’s freedom from incarceration and protect her from the abusive presence of misogyny in public and private spheres. For example, Aunt Kitty remains as an agent for Lilian’s release from the institution at the beginning of the film. Although a minor character, Aunt Kitty provides an ironic re-enactment of the tattered remnants of the ‘Victorian’ lady. She chats to Lilian about the price of alcohol. She tries to cheer Lilian up by playing dress-ups with gaudy hat and sequined top. As in the novel, she speaks of her preference for “ill green […] like a cactus” (130). She explains: “Men like women to dress up and make them feel good”; and, when Lilian questions her about women’s “wants,” she mutters, “fun” (130). “Fun” is a loaded term. Yet the role of Kitty is not only that of reflecting Lilian’s eccentricity and grotesquely ‘garbed’ sexuality, but also is one of guardianship. In the novel, Kitty’s secret knowledge and power over her brother Albion are implicit although unexplained. In the film, this relationship is omitted. Instead, Kitty functions as an agent of transition for Lilian’s re-entry into city life and female experience after years of institutionalization. Lilian thus becomes free to be an exhibitionist, a lewd inverter of the codes of accepted female behaviour, a character who transgresses the performative through her evanescent perceptions and proclamations.

Flâneuse: Shifting Perceptions of Lived Experience In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau suggests the social and historical “openings” created by the twistings, disruptions, and U-turns of walkers in the city. Walkers both appropriate and modify the text written by a city’s urban planners and architects: In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.29

29

de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117.

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Lilian’s meanderings, both in her youth and particularly in her old age, epitomize this free adaptation of the city’s urban design, this “freedom of the city” brought about by living outside the accepted codes of the society.30 This is differently pursued in the novel and in the film, and reflects the more contingent processes of reading and translating. De Certeau’s parallel between the shifting subjectivities of city walkers and the interpretative practices of readers is useful here. A reader activates the “system of signs” found in a narrative according to continually shifting contexts, or, to use Hans Robert Jauss’s term, on a changing “horizon of expectations.”31 The “practiced place” of cultural translation is therefore transformative, rather than reductive. Lilian’s wanderings through the city are liberated from the need to depart from and arrive at ‘official’ places. Lilian’s performances also reflect shifting perceptions of lived experience. Anne Friedberg’s thesis on the flâneuse may be helpful here in extending de Certeau’s analogy of the street-walker and reader. Friedberg’s late-nineteenthcentury flâneuse roams the city with the power of the female consumer in the enclosed spaces of the new department stores.32 In her use of the term ‘shopper’, Friedberg implies the power of looking, consuming, and possessing. Similarly, Lilian (in novel and film) ‘translates’ and transforms the city with her mobile gaze and her brash and rebellious speech acts. Yet Lilian does not find a secret power in ‘shopping’ for the products of a rising consumer culture. Instead, she ‘shops’ for the silences and contingencies of lived experience. Her places of observation and recitation are not situated in the contained and fixed ‘private’ space of the shopping mall but in interlinear, transitional, and mobile sites – under bridges, in taxis, on ferries, in the shadows of architectural thresholds. Furthermore, Lilian’s empowerment as a street-walker arises after her father’s death, signifying her emancipation from the constraints of middleclass patriarchal society: 30

Ruth Cracknell, quoted in Barcan, “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’,” 31. In Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Jauss’s revision of the critical modes for studying literature positions texts against a virtual “horizon of expectation” (Rezeptionsästhetik), a horizon conditioned by a continual shift in paradigms of intellectual and social thought. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. & ed. Timothy Bahti, intro. Paul de Man (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1982). 32 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993): 36. 31

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Father’s death made me weightless and I was discovering new ways of journeying through my life. It is better to travel, I would remind myself, when my room began to close in around me, and Frank was nowhere to be found. No one enjoying life can afford not to journey, I told people beside me in the bus […] the arriving was not the important thing. (228–29)

The film depicts Lilian’s journeying after her father’s death in a montage sequence, compressing memory, time, and space. Her new-found freedom in journeying leads her to her lost ‘love’ F.J. Stroud. She travels in taxis, on buses and trams, walks the streets and gradually discovers a drunken Frank making home in a stormwater channel. In both the novel and the film, Lilian proclaims, “Mobility is the key” (229). However, in Grenville’s novel, her aimless wanderings give her the freedom from the oppression of “being a daughter,” from her night-time journeys through the countryside, to her later adaptation of travelling the city according to her own script, just as the migrant’s camera perceives the city of Sydney afresh. Lilian ‘invents’ a character which she intends to impose on the people of Sydney’s memories, a character to play “a part in the stories of others,” to become “a small part of history” (248). As Susan Midalia suggests in her description of Rita’s final exhibition in Marion Campbell’s Lines of Flight, Lilian’s exhibition of herself is an installation that evokes “the shifting and elusive subject of a promenading gaze,” which encourages its audiences to actively create Lilian as folk legend, a haunting of their lived experience.33

The Film: Spatial and Temporal Mobility While the novel, shaped as a traditional Bildungsroman, takes us linearly through Lilian’s life towards her moment of self-determination (or self-acceptance), the film of Lilian’s Story compresses Lilian’s youth into selected flashbacks surrounding the central mystery of what happened between Lilian and her oppressive father Albion. Thus, Domaradzki’s film ignores the historicity of Grenville’s feminism. Gone are the details of feminist history which background the story of Lilian. The mise-en-scène depicts the crowds and the lights of what we know from previous texts or experience as Kings Cross, yet there is no signage to indicate a specific place. In the background 33

Susan Midalia. “The Contemporary Female Bildungsroman: Gender, Genre and the Politics of Optimism,” Westerly 41.1 (Autumn 1996): 102.

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of many scenes are strip-clubs, casinos, banks, a wig shop, an unnamed café, a seafood shop, and a laundromat, signposted in neon. While the viewer who knows Sydney would recognize Kings Cross, to others it could be the sleazy section of any city. The people shown in the streets and on the buses signify shifts in the society’s accepted codes and modes of behaviour after Lilian’s re-entry into it. We know by the dialogue that she “has been institutionalized for forty years,” rather than the ten or so years of the novel, so that she is an old lady when she re-enters Sydney life rather than a woman just passed her prime. In the first third of the film, Lilian explores her new terrain by jumping on buses and into taxis. A series of angry encounters with individuals who cross paths with Lilian serves to comment on capitalism and democracy in the mid1990s. An upset Asian transvestite complains to a bus driver when Lilian recites Shakespeare into his ear (“my gay apparel”) without realizing its connotations. A businessman wearing one earring frowns at Lilian. Fashion has changed. The crowd represents a multicultural Australia, rather than the milieu of Australian feminism that Grenville invokes. Domaradzki’s film thus presents us with the after-effects of feminism and multicultural policies. It reconceptualizes the bohemian milieu of Sydney in the 1960s as the culturally diverse, yet conservative, moment of the mid-1990s. The mix of people in the crowds that witness Lilian’s recitations are shown as alienated individuals in a fast-paced urban environment – a ‘no-place’ – and, although the crowd is cosmopolitan, there is little sense of community except among those who live and work on the streets. The final scene depicts the protagonist travelling through the landscape voicing ‘her’ story, and asserting her fame. Lilian proposes three conditions for the taxi driver to take her on a long journey that involve present, future, and past. The first condition relates to the present. She asserts her opposition to “posturing, posing and affectation.” The second condition ensures her place in people’s memories in the future: “you agree to remember me with a smile.” The final condition asks us to recognize the past in all its facets: “everything matters, and is necessary to make up our lives.” The scene therefore proposes a note of hope in proclaiming her memory, the invisible threads of all lived experience and the ‘falsity’ of those who do not ‘perform’. The snake-like road signifies the presence of stories that are not hers to possess, speech acts implicit in the landscape. Behind the wheel is an Indigenous man who literally shares the ‘last laugh’ with Lilian. Yet his presence as conduit across landscape, memory, past and present signifies Domaradzki’s translation of

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Lilian’s Story from a feminist story to one that acknowledges the importance of Indigenous agency.

Conclusion Lilian’s Story continues to reverberate in this essay, just as the memory of Bea Miles remains in translation in the minds of Sydneysiders. This intertextuality is an active process of cultural translation, the making of meaning that permeates social boundaries, individual psychologies, and artistic contexts. Lilian’s acts of utterance as flâneuse, street-walker, and storyteller tell much of the contingent aspects of history in all its guises. Grenville’s Lilian’s Story indexes the historical and feminist nature of this character’s rite of passage. Domaradzki’s film seems to universalize its meaning, telling the tale of an ‘Other’ happy to journey on peripheral trajectories. The story in all its phases signifies the movement of meaning that works in translation.

WORKS CITED Barber, Lynden. “A Healthy Madness,” Weekend Australian (20 April 1996): 12. Barcan, Ruth. “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’: Bodies, Boundaries and Movement in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 29.2 (April 1998): 31–55. Also in the present volume (93–117). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997). ——. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity 1990 (London: Routledge, 1999). Campion, Jane, dir. An Angel at My Table (A B C /Channel Four Films / Hibiscus Films, U K / A U S / N Z / U S A 1990; 158 min.). Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P, 1988). Connolly, Keith. “Lilian Reveals Echoes of Lodz,” The Sunday Age (12 May 1996), Agenda: 7. Crompton, Helen. “Her Own Worst Critic,” West Australian (15 May 1996): 3. De Heer, Rolf, dir. Bad Boy Bubby (A B C /Bubby Productions / Fandango, A U S / Italy 1993; 114 min.). Dening, Greg. Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (New York: Cambridge U P (Canto), 1994). Dermody, Susan, & Elizabeth Jacka. The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a National Cinema, vol. 2 (Sydney: Currency, 1988).

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Domaradzki, Jerzy, dir. Lilian’s Story (Movieco Australia / C M L Productions, AU S 1995; 94 min.). ——, dir. Struck By Lightning (Dark Horse Pictures, AU S /Poland 1990; 105 min.). Elliot, Stephan, dir. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Latent Image Productions/Specific Films/A F F C , A U S / U K 1994; 104 min.). Fitzgerald, Michael. “Truly, Madly – Cosi,” Time (1 April 1996): 65. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993). Galvin, Peter. “Psychology Sinks in Grim Shadows of Sydney Gothic,” Sydney Morning Herald (9 May 1996): 16. Grenville, Kate. Dark Places (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1994). ——. Joan Makes History (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988). ——. Lilian’s Story (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1986). Hicks, Scott, dir. Shine (A F F C / Film Victoria / South Australian Feature Film Company / Momentum Films, AU S 1996; 105 min.). Hogan, P.J., dir. Muriel’s Wedding (CiBy 2000/Film Victoria / House & Moorhouse Films, A U S / France 1994; 106 min.). Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. & ed. Timothy Bahti, intro. Paul de Man (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1982). Joffe, Mark, dir. Cosi (A F F C / Meridian Films / Miramax Films / Smiley Films, A U S 1996; 102 min.). Luhrmann, Baz, dir. Strictly Ballroom (M & A Film Corporation / A F F C / Beyond Films, A U S 1992; 94 min.). Malouf, David. “A Spirit of Play: The Making of an Australian Consciousness,” A B C Radio National Boyer Lecture 1998. Available online at: http://www.abc. net.au /rn/boyers/98boyer1.htm Midalia, Susan. “The Contemporary Female Bildungsroman: Gender, Genre and the Politics of Optimism,” Westerly 41.1 (Autumn 1996): 89–104. Naglazas, Mark. “Poles Alike in Fine Film Treatments,” West Australian (1 May 1996): 5. Nash, Margot, writer / dir. Vacant Possession (Wintertime Films, A U S 1995; 95 min.). Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992). Portmann, Geoff, dir. Mother and Son (A B C T V Comedy, 1984–94). Roach, Vicky. “To Bea or Not to Bea – An Uneasy Blend,” Daily Telegraph (Sydney; 9 May 1996): 39. Rowe, Kathleeen. “Pig Ladies, and Ladies with Big Mouths: Feminism and the Carnivalesque,” in The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: U of Texas P, 1995): 25–51. Rustin, Emily. “Romance and Sensation in the ‘Glitter Cycle’,” Australian Cinema in the 1990s, ed. Ian Craven (London: Frank Cass, 2001): 133–48.

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Rymer, Michael, dir. Angel Baby (Astral Films / Australian Film Commission, A U S 1994; 105 min.). Sosnowski, Alexandra. “Cinema in Transition: The Polish Film Today,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 24.1 (Spring 1996): 10–17. Thornton, Mark. “Lilian’s Story Part of New Wave,” Canberra Times (19 June 1994): 22.

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Constructions of Nation and Gender in The Idea of Perfection —— S UE K OSSEW

“Perhaps some will say it is a reaction to Dark Places. But [. . . ] I see it as part of a process. I had to look into the dark, and having looked at the dark, now I want to find out how to incorporate the light with it. So one of the juxtapositions I play with in this book [The Idea of Perfection] is light and dark [. . . ] Now I am interested in balancing the two.”1

T

H E I D E A O F P E R F E C T I O N is quite obviously a lighter novel than Dark Places, often verging on the comical, a romance rather than the dark tale of incest and abuse, albeit with a touch of black humour, that is Dark Places. Both novels confront issues of gender roles and violence (both physical and representational) that are closely tied to national identity and the construction, in particular, of Australian masculinities. In both novels, Grenville implies a causal link between gender roles, power relations, and violence. In both, she is resisting and writing back to stereotypes, particularly gender stereotypes that have been deployed in the discourse of Australian nationalism and the Australian Bush. In The Idea of Perfection (1999), she is gently questioning the small-mindedness of country towns while simultaneously extolling the values of the bush. At the same time, she examines critically the stereotypical roles for Australians that form an unrealizable standard of ‘perfection’ or, rather, the performance of conformity to such standards. It is suggested by Brigid Rooney in her essay on Grenville’s feminism in this collection that Dark Places signalled Grenville’s “shift away from a gynocen-

1

Kate Grenville on The Idea of Perfection, in Angela Bennie, “Nobody’s Perfect: Review of The Idea of Perfection,” Sydney Morning Herald (31 July 1999), Spectrum: 8.

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tric approach to one that was more in line with an idea of gender as an embodied social construction – an idea that allowed masculinity to come into view” (page 23 above). The constructed notion of gender and, in particular, its performative qualities are indeed crucial to Grenville’s treatment of gender relations in both Dark Places and The Idea of Perfection. It is also clear that she is tuned in to the links between Australian identity and constructions of masculinities, and to the way in which “masculinities are created and enacted in specific historical circumstances” and that, as those circumstances change, “gender practices can be contested and reconstructed.”2 If Dark Places is Grenville’s attempt at understanding the “dark territory” of the mind of a Darwinian man, Albion Gidley Singer, “made” by the pressure of social constructions of Australian masculinity, particularly in the early years of Federation, The Idea of Perfection takes a more contemporary, perhaps even postfeminist, view of gender relations. Its lighter tone signals that it is a wry satire of established myths about the Australian Bush – particularly its stultifying effects on gender roles for men and women and the pressure of “belonging” that is tied to the concept of Australian national identity. The link between Australian nationalism and the “notion that the ideals of a perfect society are already embodied within the […] Australian, male individual” is still a powerful one.3 In this way, the well-worn concept of the Australian type, or the typical Australian, who is always gendered male, is part of the mythology of Australian identity, despite its being rooted in nostalgia. Russel Ward’s 1958 description of the typical “Aussie bloke” rehearses the clichés that are still in circulation, though often with added irony, in contemporary Australia: [He is] a practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry any appearance of affectation in others […]. He swears hard and consistently, gambles heavily and often, and drinks deeply on occasion […]. He is fiercely independent […] above all he will stick to his mates through thick and thin, even if he thinks they may be wrong.4 2

R.W. Connell, “Introduction: Australian Masculinities,” in Male Trouble: Looking at Australian Masculinities ed. Mike Donaldson & Stephen Tomsen (Melbourne: Pluto, 2003): 17. 3 Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People: Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington D C : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988): 195. 4 Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1958): 16–17.

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While the somewhat negative aspects of male behaviour are ‘excused’ in this description of an ideal masculinity that allows for and even endorses men behaving badly, the standards for women are, on the contrary, based on the need to be ‘good’. Jill Matthews suggests that the pursuit of Australian femininity is both culturally conditioned and self-enforced and that it has traditionally been based on “the struggle to behave like and be a good woman according to her own and society’s standards.”5 In view of this novel’s exploration of such gender and social roles, based on these Australian gender types, it is surely no coincidence that the favourite phrase of one of the novel’s characters, Coralie Henderson, is “type of thing.” The ‘idea of perfection’ is at the heart of the ‘epistemic violence’ of these stereotypes: trying to be perfect means trying to conform to an impossible role that has been assigned by society and that is closely tied to constructions of national identity. Grenville’s novel explores what happens to individuals when performing such a role, which is an impossible fiction. The three main characters in the novel, each of whom attempts to meet the ideal of perfection, Felicity Porcelline, Harley Savage, and Douglas Cheeseman, are either destroyed by it (in Felicity’s case) or ultimately resist it. In the case of Harley and Douglas, they do so by forming an unlikely relationship, an alliance of misfits. Felicity’s subjectivity is tied to the notion of the ideal housewife, whose role is to obsessively clean out dirt from every corner of her house, and to the need to conform to the ideal of a woman who has perfect skin, the ‘porcelain’ complexion evoked by her surname. Her beauty routines, while essentially comical, are also sad: she limits the number of times she has to smile, look up or go out into the sun, in order to reduce the chance of getting wrinkles. Harley, by contrast, is obsessed with her inability to perform the traditional role of women, mainly because of her “dangerous streak,” which, as she sees it, has made her “lose” three husbands, the last one to suicide, for which she has always blamed herself. Douglas sees himself as falling way behind the ideal of masculine perfection – he is an engineer who suffers from vertigo, the far-from-fearless son of a dead war hero who epitomizes the ‘Aussie Digger’ and with whom he shares a name (his father was, he believe, the “real Douglas Cheeseman,” whereas he is simply an impostor), and he is a “duffer” who constantly apologizes for just being there and never being good enough. What the idea of perfection does to each of them is to point up their inadequacies 5

Jill Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984): 8.

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and to cause each of them to become dissociated from their own emotions. It is only at the end of the novel, when Harley and Douglas begin to communicate beyond verbal language, that Harley feels “for once” that her looking into Douglas’s eyes was “not a performance” and that “there did not seem to be a running commentary on it.”6 Throughout the novel, the protagonists become aware of themselves as characters, speaking words as if from a script. The constant use of italics signals the lack of sincerity in such dialogue, as if someone else had written the preordained and overused words in order to fit gender stereotypes. It is such stereotypes, indeed, that Harley and Douglas overcome in the end, in order to become ‘themselves’, while Felicity succumbs to her obsessiveness, which is all that is left to her after her affair (or awkwardness, as she euphemistically calls it) with Freddy Chang, the butcher/ photographer, allowing her to see herself finally as a “cruel smiling child” (393). Grenville’s novel has some of the same sense that Thea Astley engenders in her final novel, Drylands, also published in 1999, of the small-mindedness and petty cruelties of the bush, especially the sense of surveillance the city ‘intruders’ feel.7 Harley, for example, “had forgotten how empty a country town could be, how blank-windowed, how you could feel looked-at and large” (6). Grenville captures, too, Felicity’s unthinking, almost automatic racism against Chinese people. Yet Grenville’s is a much less searing portrait of country towns than Astley’s; more of a tribute to what she has called the “wonderful quirky distinctiveness” of country people who have “a very healthy indifference to matching up to any kind of stereotype.”8 In The Idea of Perfection, it is, according to Grenville, the “city newcomers who make complete fools of themselves in the country” rather than, as in Astley’s novel, the exposure of the small-minded pettiness of country types. Part of Grenville’s sense of what she sees as the more exciting and positive aspects of country towns is her “sad feeling that a very good and valuable part of Australian culture is dying on its feet.”9 At the same time, she is aware of the comic 6

Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection (Sydney: Picador, 1999): 389. Further page references are in the main text. 7 Thea Astley, Drylands: A Book for the World’s Last Reader (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1999). 8 Grenville, quoted by Jane Sullivan, “Out of the Dark,” The Age (14 August 1999), Saturday Extra: 7. 9 Grenville, quoted by Sullivan, “Out of the Dark,” 7.

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aspects of such a nostalgic view of Australian ‘bush-types.’ In an interview about the novel, Grenville has commented that The Idea of Perfection is recognizably Australian, in that it is “close enough to the stereotype of Australia – the bronzed Aussie outback thing” but that it is also different, in that it is “a comedy, and a kind of romance, and the setting isn’t the heroic parched outback but the sub-culture of the country town.”10 She draws an important distinction here between the ordinariness of the country town and its inhabitants and the “heroic parched outback” which, in its extraordinariness, has traditionally been the setting for masculinist stereotypes of daring exploits of exploration, discovery, and survival. This focus on the stories of everyday people, with its two main protagonists far from heroic figures, blurs the template of the Australian epic and its formulaic gender roles. As Grenville has said, Australian writers are so lucky – so much about Australia hasn’t been written about yet. Our history is full of fantastic stories that haven’t been told, our landscape has only been written about in parts, and so many ways of being Australian haven’t been written about up till now. We’re a new country, but also we’re a country that’s changing so fast, there are new ways of being Australian evolving all the time [. . . ] there’s still plenty to explore.11

This is an alternative anti-heroic view of history as story rather than epic, emphasizing what the Canadian writer Daphne Marlatt has suggested is an alternative feminist vision to the “old heroic script” and the “great diorama” of history.12 Instead, Marlatt proposes that women’s writing “foregrounds relatedness and community.”13 In Grenville’s novel, her representation of the two main protagonists rewrites the “heroic script” of gendered national identity, and the novel’s proposal of a history of the everyday, evoked in the town’s Heritage Museum, draws attention to the idea of history as the collective memory of ordinary folk, in this way foregrounding “relatedness and community” rather than individual acts of heroism.

10

Maggie Ball, “Interview with Kate Grenville: 27 February 2001,” http://www .suite101.com/mybulletin.cfm/authors/5643 (accessed 20 June 2008). 11 Ball, “Interview with Kate Grenville.” 12 Daphne Marlatt, “Subverting the Heroic in Feminist Writing of the West Coast,” in Readings from the Labyrinth (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1998): 87. 13 Marlatt, “Subverting the Heroic,” 99.

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There is an important link between the novel’s two main tropes, those of patchwork and constructing bridges, and the writing process itself. Grenville has commented on her own writing style as a kind of fabrication, an arranging of fragments into a whole that is, she suggests, like the art of quilting: It is a question of putting together things which don’t necessarily, on the face of it, have any overt relationship, or value, but something happens when you put it all together.14

Like patchwork, bridges, too, are structures that require a patient building of sections to make up a whole (Douglas’s solution to rebuilding the Bent Bridge is that of modules). In the same interview, Grenville draws a parallel between writing and building: “I realised that building a bridge and writing a novel are exactly the same thing [...] having a new problem to solve every day.” All three are linked in her statement that quilting is “putting shapes together in a structural way.” In this way, her writing style (that of fragments that the reader puts together to form a whole, with pieces of each character’s story gradually emerging into a pattern; and the patchworking principle of the juxtaposition of light and dark triangles) is not just a structural notion but is integral to the novel’s major tropes, each of which also stands for its main characters. Douglas is, of course, associated with the scientific discourse of engineering, yet he waxes lyrical about the flexible nature of cement as both liquid and solid, while Harley is an unconventional patchworker whose pieces are artworks that reflect the Australian environment. It is their relationship that embodies the novel’s epigraph from Leonardo da Vinci – “an arch is two weaknesses which together make a strength.” Language itself (with its overused phrases and ideas – ideas that have been “domesticated by words,” 341), gender stereotypes, stereotypes of place and landscape, myths of city and bush, and false expectations about relationships are all implicated in the sense of inadequacy that each of these characters has about belonging. Douglas and Harley particularly (and Felicity, too, to some extent) are outsiders, intruders, city types who find, despite the platitudes, a sense of themselves (and each other) in the bush. While stressing that neither Douglas nor Harley conforms to social gender stereotypes of weak female and strong male (Harley is strong; Douglas is not – it is Harley who has to save Douglas from being run down by stampeding cows rather than the other way round), Grenville also satirizes some of the gender stereotypes prevalent 14

Grenville, quoted in Angela Bennie, “Nobody’s Perfect,” 8.

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in Australian literature and iconic cultural texts. Harley, for example, is seen at first through Douglas’s eyes as a typical ‘drover’s wife’. He mistakes her for a true country type, not knowing, of course, that like him she is from the city. On first seeing her, for example, he describes her as a “big rawboned plain person, tall and unlikely,” who “stood like a man, square-on” (2). He perceives her as a “salt of the earth type” living “a proper life anchored solid to the ground” (3). Her apparent androgyny – she is described as having “forgotten about breasts being sexy” (2) – is reminiscent both of Henry Lawson’s drover’s wife and of Russell Drysdale’s eponymous painting. Lawson’s drover’s wife is “gaunt” and “sun-browned” with a “worn-out breast.”15 This overused imagery is revisited in Douglas’s later perceptions of Harley: a real country sort of woman, in her battered old shoes and the baggy tracksuit. Her face was brown from the sun, her cheeks coarsened by years of weather, but the blood flowed vigorously under the skin. Under the old track-pants, he thought she would have powerful legs, getting her along the miles of country back roads and over the paddocks. (101)

The irony, of course, lies in the reader’s prior knowledge that Harley is not only visiting Karakarook from Sydney (and is not one of the locals or a country woman at all) but that she also has heart trouble and is far from physically fit. In fact, she nearly drowns when swimming in a swimming-hole in the bush. Douglas’s instant and mistaken identification of Harley with the drover’s-wife type demonstrates the gap between stereotype and individual, as well as the persistence of such stereotypes into the twenty-first century. Douglas both admires and seems to fear Harley’s perceived strength. He describes her as “tall and solid, striding through the landscape [.. .] like an army marching” (384), while he feels himself to be “a flimsy man alone with his shadow” (328). Throughout the scene where the town’s “greenies,” including Harley, confront Douglas and the men who are to demolish the bridge, Douglas ascribes a kind of primitive Amazon-like quality to Harley. Her African dress, for example, had “a vigorous barbaric look, the pattern emphatic, bold as a danger sign” (323), and the “primitive ornament on a strip of leather around her throat” is seen by him as “possibly a dagger [.. .] decoration, but [.. .] also a weapon” (323).

15

Henry Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife” (1892), in Collected Short Stories of Henry Lawson (North Ryde, N S W : Collins / Angus & Robertson, 1990): 89, 94.

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If Douglas sees Harley (whose very name suggests a kind of macho power) as strong and ‘masculine’, he himself has never been “one of the blokes.” On meeting Chook Henderson, the epitome of Australian masculinity, Douglas wonders “how you got to be a Chook Henderson [...] It seemed to come naturally to them [... ] Whatever it was, it was too late for him now” (52). Similarly, even the most basic of ‘Aussie bloke’ mateship rituals seem unnatural to Douglas. When greeting the barman with a “G’day mate,” Douglas “hoped it didn’t sound like satire” (48). With his fellow workers at the bridge, he feels excluded from “the circle of men” (185), whose banter was “like a foreign language of which he could only catch the odd phrase” (184). Always aware that he does not conform to the stereotype of the Aussie bloke, Douglas has to “read up on” sports pages, always wishing that he could be “another sort of man” (5), the sort who is seen as “normal” (211). In contrast to Harley’s perceived strength, Douglas feels his own inadequacy even more keenly, as in the following: Watching Harley Savage stride purposefully, gesture decisively, laugh in that big confident way, he [Douglas] wished he could find it in himself to be a different and less invisible kind of man. (286)

Grenville links such unforgiving gender stereotypes to the pressure of national myths of belonging and to a notion of shared Australianness. It is not just gender roles that determine one’s ability to measure up to the prevailing standards for national identity. It has long been the case that the Australian bush and country towns have been represented as the true heart of Australia. The bush / city divide, which emerged in the 1890s as part of the invention of the Australian legend, projected the Bush as the testing ground for national belonging. Richard White reflects on the enduring nature of this powerful imaginary thus: It was essentially the city-dweller’s image of the bush, a sunlit landscape of faded blue hills, cloudless skies and noble gum trees, peopled by idealized shearers and drovers. Australians were urged to respond to this image emotionally, as a test of their patriotism.16

It is clear that Douglas, while trying hard to respond in this way, feels more like an intruder in the bush. For example, he feels “small under the big harsh

16

Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981): 85.

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sky” (193), sensing that the “country suns,” while seeming “kindly,” had “something metallic and unforgiving about them”(193). When he goes exploring in the bush, he initially identifies with it, feeling that “Nature was all around him, expansive, generous, like a hospitable host” (88), but he soon becomes lost, “huge and conspicuous,” not exploring but trespassing (91). In a comic episode that references the lost-child motif in Australian cultural expression as well as the famous cattle scene from D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Douglas is chased by a herd of cows. Unable to work out how to escape the stampede, Douglas suggests that “being in the country felt like one long intelligence test he was failing” (104). Later, sipping tea with Chook Henderson and the other men working on the bridge, Douglas feels “stiff and foreign,” affected by a profound sense of not belonging. He muses on the nature of being Australian: But if you were Australian, you were supposed to feel at home in the country. The bush, rather. They seemed to call it that, even when it was just plain old paddocks. The message had come through loud and clear at school. An Australian was a man on the back of a horse [. . . ] So the kids at Kogarah Public School, who had never seen a sheep or a cow except at the Show, had had to learn how to be Australian off the blackboard [. . . ] They had sung Click Go the Shears [. . . ] They had recited I Love a Sunburnt Country and tried to believe they did. Douglas Cheeseman’s pale freckled skin did not love a sunburnt country, and for a long time he had thought a sweeping plain was something to do with woodwork, but he had sung as sincerely as the rest. He had thought you could simply apply yourself to it, and learn to be the sort of Australian you were supposed to be. He could see now that it would never be that simple. (191–92; italics in original)

Douglas is rehearsing here the stereotypical images of Australian identity that tap into a nostalgic notion of the bush and of nationhood that, while clearly outdated, still has cultural purchase. It is partly the inability of a city person to identify with such images that contributes to Douglas’s sense of not belonging and to his subsequent inadequacy. But Grenville, of course, is satirizing the over-simplification of this notion of nation, this invention of place, that ignores the complexity of contemporary Australian society, which is not “that simple.” However, Douglas is also aware of the limitations imposed on him by his inability to perform this mythologized version of Australian masculinity. For

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example, while exploring the streets of Karakarook, Douglas comes upon the town’s A N Z A C memorial with its epigraph To Our Glorious Dead in gold leaf commemorating the names of the local war heroes (212). Douglas, always consumed by guilt and inadequacy over his own father’s death in the war, and seeing himself as an impostor, as he bears the same name but lacks his father’s heroism, “had never liked the gold-leaf lists” on such memorials but he instinctively understands that “you could not admit that to anyone” (212). Such an admission would be considered un-Australian. Australian nationalism itself is at stake in the mythology of the ‘Aussie digger’ and the Gallipoli story of defeat that is also a kind of victory. Such memorials bear the symbolic weight of the links between nationhood, identity, and war. Part of the exclusionary practices that such simplistic definitions of nation inevitably produce is the ‘othering’ of those who are seen as not typically Australian. Grenville has Felicity articulate the kind of unthinking racism that has her obsessed with Freddy’s difference, his being Chinese. In the following passage, the insistence in the phrase “she was no racist” inevitably evokes Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party, whose denials of racism were matched by constant references to minority groups being ‘un-Australian’: She was no racist. She was sure of that. But she never thought of Alfred Chang as Australian in the way she herself was Australian. He was Chinese, no matter how long Changs had been in Karakarook. (16)

Felicity is troubled by Freddy’s similarity – “he spoke exactly the way everyone else did” (16) – to the others in the town, desperately seeking some outward sign of difference to confirm her racist preconceptions. Thus, she “listened for something Chinese in the way he talked, the little foreign something” but “it was never there” (16). Despite this lack of difference, Felicity clings to her prejudices. It is the very instability of the notion of national identity that worries Felicity, who would like it to be much simpler: a division into Australian and non-Australian. Her essentialist view of race as innate difference rather than cultural practice confuses her responses to Freddy, whose face she searches for inscrutability and whose gift of strawberries she initially confuses for dogs’ hearts, as she remembers that Chinese people “eat dog” (24). This projection onto Freddy of fear and danger was also typical of the historical vilification of the Chinese miners who arrived during the gold rushes of the 1850s that led to their being represented as a danger to ‘democracy’ and as dirty and diseased. Most particularly, they were seen as posing

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the danger of sexual attack for white women, as the ‘Yellow Peril’. The affair between Felicity and Freddy is thus conducted against a background of the well-established prejudice against interracial sexual relations that has become part of the mythology of white Australian nationhood. The construction of History as grand narrative is juxtaposed with an alternative view of the past in the novel’s juxtaposition of notions of epic history with the history of everyday lives. Harley brings to the town the idea of heritage as the memories and memorabilia of ordinary people. She has to discourage the townsfolk from bringing their best family heirlooms for the Heritage Museum she is helping them to establish: What would put Karakarook on the map were the things that were so ordinary that no one had thought of keeping any of them […] all the improvised things made for their houses by people who never had enough money to buy one from the shops. Those things did not survive, because no one thought they were worth keeping. (143)

Harley realizes that the city tourists want to see the “improvisation, the ingenuity, the thrift” of those ordinary people who had to adapt to the harshness of life in the bush, and that they would then go back to Sydney “feeling they had been in touch with the real spirit of the bush” (144: italics in original). While such a collection is seen to celebrate the new fashion for the “Australian vernacular,” Harley is genuinely moved by the old ladle made out of a metal file she is given for the museum, feeling it to be a “labour of love” and understanding the implications of this “corny old phrase” (235). Set against this history of domesticity and improvised adaptation to the rigours of the bush is the kind of epic history that is symbolized by the town’s street names with their classical eurocentrism. The main street is Parnassus Road, which meets Virgil Street, the names showing off the ‘classical’ aspirations of the town’s founding fathers (212). In contrast, it is implied that the Indigenous history of the town’s name, Karakarook, which means ‘elbow’ (cf. ‘crook’... ) in the local Aboriginal language and thus echoes the shape of the Bent Bridge, is taken for granted and is not considered as important as its European history. In memorializing the more ordinary history of domestic life by way of the Heritage Museum, Harley, like Douglas, is contesting the pressure to conform to the heroic status of the past by reconstituting an alternative suppressed history.

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Similarly, Harley contests the distinctions between high art and craft in her own patchwork designs. Once dismissed by her sister as “just craft” (208), Harley’s patchworks now attract the critical attention and academic discourse of the art establishment, which assigns to them the status of “fibre art,” “wittily subvert[ing] the form” (152). Harley’s designs are based not on the highart notions of a capitalized “Nature” that Harley’s famous artist–father has always believed to be the subject of all Art, but on the landscape she sees around her. Her artworks are made out of the ordinary fabric of past lives – old suit material and a favourite dress that has been cut up and used for scraps. In recognizing the landscape around her as the very material of her art, Harley, unlike her father, whose artwork depends on “flowers arranged nicely in a vase” (200), finds a way of imaging place. The patterning of the patchwork depends on contrast between light and dark, and Harley is aware of the landscape itself as “sunlight and shadow [.. .] together in big simple shapes. Light, dark” (37), unlike her father, who sees his “in-law’s shabby farm, everything grey and blistered in the dry and the heat,” as “not the Nature he was thinking of” (200). The contrast between Harley’s response to the Australian landscape and her father’s preconceived notions of a more European Nature that is not grey, dry, and hot is, like the exhibits in the Heritage Museum, representative of a more indigenous national picture, one that is not dependent on old European ways of seeing. Like Grenville’s own approach to writing, then, Harley’s patchwork is imaged as a “kind of magic” and “part of a pattern” that can illuminate the relationship between dull and jewel-like pieces of fabric (207), changing the one into the other. In keeping with the idea of balance in binary oppositions like light and dark, Grenville uses the image of two arches of a bridge to undermine preconceptions about what constitutes strength and weakness, and how these are traditionally associated with gender roles. Watching Harley making one of her patchworks from his hidden vantage point outside her window, Douglas sees her as a well-designed mechanism “or a beam of reinforced concrete” (333). His perception of her strength highlights what he sees as his own weakness: He was flimsy, trussed about, bolted stiffly together into an ugly rigid muddle of members to disguise the basic weakness of the structure. But she had both the strength of the concrete and the flexibility of the reinforcement. The greater the load, the stronger she would get [...] She would be able to stretch under tension. She was not brittle. She was flesh and bone together, bending without breaking. (334)

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Significantly, it is at this point that Douglas acknowledges his love for Harley, just as she herself realizes that her fear of his vulnerability (“as a being far too easy to do violence to,” 243) is part of her fear of her own well-disguised frailty. As she later acknowledges, “It occurred to her that being a duffer might be something he did to protect himself, the way having a dangerous streak was what she did” (268: italics in original). The “two weaknesses which together make a strength” is thus their relationship, that, like the Bent Bridge, “looked weak but [.. .] was not,” a structure that had, like Harley and Douglas themselves, been damaged but whose damage was “the very thing that made it strong” (62). This ability to admit to their own imperfections distinguishes Harley and Douglas as characters from Albion’s steely coldness in Dark Places. As Grenville has commented about The Idea of Perfection: I could see it [the novel] is really about people accepting the dark side of themselves, the imperfections and weaknesses. And realizing that not only are they things you have to put up with, they’re what make you a proper human being.17

The play of light and dark in this novel – which echoes the juxtapositions of different fabrics in Harley’s patchwork quilting – as opposed to the unrelenting darkness of Dark Places enables Grenville to re-imagine gender relations and constructions of nationhood in a more contemporary context of give and take.

WORKS CITED Astley, Thea, Drylands: A Book for the World’s Last Reader (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1999). Ball, Maggie. “Interview with Kate Grenville: 27 February 2001,” http://www .suite101.com/mybulletin.cfm/authors/5643 Bennie, Angela. “Nobody’s Perfect,” Sydney Morning Herald (31 July 1991), Spectrum: 8. Connell, R.W. “Introduction: Australian Masculinities,” in Male Trouble: Looking at Australian Masculinities ed. Mike Donaldson & Stephen Tomsen (Melbourne: Pluto, 2003): 9–21. Grenville, Kate. Dark Places (Sydney: Picador, 1995). 17

Murray Waldren, “The Imperfect Perfectionist,” Weekend Australian (8 September 2001), Magazine: 28.

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——. The Idea of Perfection (Sydney: Picador, 1999). Kapferer, Bruce. Legends of People: Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington D C : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988). Lawson, Henry. “The Drover’s Wife” (1892), in Collected Short Stories of Henry Lawson (North Ryde, N S W : Collins/Angus & Robertson, 1990): 89–94. Marlatt, Daphne. “Subverting the Heroic in Feminist Writing of the West Coast,” in Readings from the Labyrinth (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1998): 86–107. Matthews, Jill Julius. Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984). Sullivan, Jane. “Out of the Dark,” The Age (14 August 1999), Saturday Extra: 7 Waldren, Murray. “The Imperfect Perfectionist,” Weekend Australian Magazine (8 September 2001), Magazine: 28. Ward, Russel. The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1958). White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981).

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Poison in the Flour1 Kate Grenville’s The Secret River 2

—— E LEANOR C OLLINS

A

T R O C I T Y , especially atrocity in your own country, does not make for a cosy read. Kate Grenville’s The Secret River is a discomforting novel: compelling through long stretches, evocative, but also troubling. Much of the discomfort and trouble belongs to the history that is its subject-matter. There is a commingled distance and association, often a paralysis born of denial and guilt, in the general white Australian response to stories of colonial injustice and barbarity. This is a disabling emotional conflict that we might experience individually, and that is played out on a national scale in the so-called ‘history wars’. As well as the discomforts of Australian history, I felt discomfort relating to narrative form on first reading The Secret River. I had nagging doubts about the realist historical novel and the way its conventions structure this particular story. Since then, I have reconsidered the narrative, looking through the lens of tragedy, which is a mode I tentatively recommend for understanding this work of fiction and also when confronting the history it dramatizes.

1

In a scene towards the end of The Secret River, Thornhill comes across an Aboriginal family who are dying from poisoning and thinks of his murderous neighbour’s “green powder.” Accounts of Aboriginal people’s food rations being deliberately poisoned arise in almost all of the former Australian colonies. Their veracity is contested – like every aspect of this history – but they constitute a widespread, vivid, and persistent element of the early colonial story. 2 For sharing ideas with me at an early stage in the writing of this essay, my thanks to Clara Tuite, Department of English and Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, and her 2005 Honours seminar on the historical novel.

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The plot of The Secret River draws on three powerful Australian myths, playing one off against the other two. First, we have the familiar, nostalgic narrative of the almost-innocent convict. William Thornhill is born into poverty, cold, and hunger in eighteenth-century London. He grows up at the cruel end of a merciless English class system, is neglected by his parents, abused by employers, and learns skilful theft as a means of survival. At fourteen, he becomes an apprentice boatman on the Thames, meaning he can make his way out of utter penury through years of hard work and eventually marry Sal, his love. But Thornhill’s rise in fortune is short-lived: one harsh winter leaves him indebted. He steals a boatload of timber, and is caught and sentenced to hang. The sentence is commuted to transportation and he, Sal and their children are dispatched to New South Wales. Within this national myth, England is a land of arrogant gentry and unjust authority that produces, unwittingly, a better, fairer, harder-working Australia by sending here those subjects whose chief crime is need. Once the Thornhill family is in New South Wales, the myth of the worthy convict segues gracefully into a second national myth: the McCubbin-esque story of the pioneer.3 Thornhill works enterprisingly as a boatman between Sydney and the Hawkesbury, the frontier of settlement. He earns his pardon, then takes his family to a stretch of the river he has seen and coveted. They set about building an oasis of civilization in the wilderness. With meagre resources but massive determination, they define domestic space, plant crops, take on servants. This part of the novel has Crusoe-like aspects: it is a tale of surviving and building, of the self-made man (and woman), courageous in a dangerously unfamiliar landscape, working, risking, gaining reward. But the familiar flow and shape of the pioneer myth is regularly interrupted here by appearances of the Darug people, who already live on the Hawkesbury. For the Thornhill family, these appearances are disruptive because ‘the blacks’ are unpredictable and frightening: they carry spears and do not respect boundaries, thus threatening life and property. For the reader of The Secret River, these interruptions challenge the legitimacy of the pioneer story, and its feeling of triumph. We have suffered alongside William Thornhill and are 3

The painter Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917) was a prominent member of the Heidelberg School of Australian artists. His large realist canvases depicting settler hardship and bush life are national icons. See, for example, his sentimental triptych masterpiece, The Pioneer (1904) (National Gallery of Victoria), http://www.artistsfootsteps. com/images/McCubbin_pioneer.jpg

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ready to revel in his hard-earned independence and growing prosperity. But awareness of prior landowners and their competing needs deflates the optimism otherwise promised by a tale of liberal individualist self-improvement. Once we know of the Darug, the Thornhills cannot build a home and gain the material comforts their pioneer story demands without also building narrative tension and a sense of impending violence. Our sympathy as readers with Thornhill and his problems becomes an increasingly awkward stance. One of the discomforts of The Secret River is the pressure of weighing the Thornhills’ considerable suffering in an unjust English class system against the Darug people’s unimaginable suffering in an unjust colonial racial system. Grenville almost certainly does not intend any equation, but there is a sense in the novel’s structure that one system of harshness and lack has led directly to the other. Thus the third national myth Grenville employs, unsettling the myths of the worthy convict and the toiling pioneer, is the fraught but insistent story of first contact. Stories of early encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Australians are a recurrent feature of Australian literature. Many of our acclaimed authors have given us variations on this theme: Thea Astley, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf – just to begin the list. We keep returning to this historical frontier, this boundary in time between ‘before’ and ‘since then’. Stories of present-day encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are far less frequent, and far less consistent in their elements and themes. Perhaps there is a sense that the moment of origin holds an explanatory key to all that has come afterwards, that a return to origin might clarify the present, resolving its guilts and conflicts. Or perhaps we keep reworking this particular historical story precisely because it does not function as a national myth. National myth should unify. It should define and bind the nation, should give the idea of the nation coherence and validity. National myth tells a shared history – consider the American story of shared harvest that is celebrated every Thanksgiving. But the stories of first contact with which white Australian history must begin are almost always stories of division: of misunderstanding and fear, of brutality and suffering. Of poison in the flour. Like national myth, the novel is a form of narrative that classically concludes with unity, at least with unity of understanding. The uncertainties, errors and miscommunications that create the plot of the classic novel are cleared up at its resolution, so that all the important characters, the narrator, and the reader are in alignment. All now share the same knowledge and the same perception of events. In contrast to this, The Secret River ends with an

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image of profound separation and difference. ‘Jimmy’, the last Indigenous person left on William Thornhill’s land, will not accept Thornhill’s charity: indeed, barely acknowledges his presence. Thornhill doesn’t know why, cannot fully grasp the import of what has taken place: he still cannot comprehend Jimmy. Neither novel nor nation can find unity in this encounter.  Grenville has written an Australian historical novel before. Joan Makes History was published in the Bicentennial year. It taunts the conventions and authorities of written history, telling the story of Australia using the voice of a deliberately disruptive woman, Joan, who metamorphoses to be present at every significant event. Self-conscious play with form and literary convention is an integral and amusing part of Grenville’s style. Lilian’s Story (1985), which won The Australian /Vogel Literary Award, is a fictional first-person ‘biography’ of Bea Miles, a Sydney eccentric. The Idea of Perfection (1999), winner of the Orange Prize, is a romance about two unromantic people. Its heroine is an artist, a quilter, who works with pieces of well-used fabric to create new and stunning objects from the old. Grenville knows that she is herself remaking old forms. Unlike these earlier works, though, The Secret River is a starkly, determinedly ‘straight’ narrative. Its realism feels disciplined. Other potential plot directions and other voices for the story emerge on the periphery but are not taken up. We stick with Thornhill, his family, his choices, his life-story and its relentless teleology. There is almost no play with history-telling here, no confessed doubt about the possibility of authentic narration, and little deliberate exposure of the hazy line between objective facts and subjective reproductions of facts. The narrative comes closest to reflecting on its own status in recurring references to characters making marks – on the page and the landscape. So, for example, at the age of sixteen, the apprentice boatman Thornhill is taught “his letters” by Sal. The description is characteristic: tactile, carefully detailed, sensual. Thornhill’s clumsy illiteracy can only draw attention to its fluent portrayal: He could smell the fruity femaleness of her, a thing like the memory of strawberries left in the wood of the punnet, that sweet flowery fragrance. She leaned in to him and said, No ink to start with. Just hold it – see? – like this, and held up her own small hand, showing.

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When he tried, it was maddening, pernickety, unnatural. The way his hand worked with an oar made sense. His fist closed around it and his thumb kept it all in place. This holding of a feather was a contortionist’s trick, pincering in with fingers and thumb, twisting the whole hand sideways, the quill rolling in his grip. Only his desire to please her made him persist.4

Unlike his parents before him, Thornhill learns to sign his own name, and he does so on the petition for his pardon. But his most significant markings are the lines made in dirt on the land he claims. The lines are in themselves the claiming: In the centre of the clearing he dragged his heel across the dirt four times, line to line. The straight lines and the square they made were like nothing else there and they changed everything. (134)

Thornhill’s markings and claims compete with earlier markings left on the landscape: diggings and rock carvings. He arrives at this realization with indignation and follows it with quick denial. The always unequal conflict over whose ‘illiterate’ markings will be recognized, who will possess the land, raises a wider question about marking and the bringing into being of meaning. Who is forging the nation here: Thornhill, the pioneer settler who labours and builds; the Darug, who persistently resist erasure; or Grenville, the storyteller who crafts national myth? This subtle, marginal self-reflection in The Secret River contrasts starkly with the overt structural playfulness of Joan Makes History. The Secret River’s narrative is certainly knowing in Grenville’s employment of our national mythology. But this knowingness is never disruptive. Questions about mark-making and legitimacy are not prominent. The Secret River never demands that we leave the level of Thornhill’s story, or that we question its realism. It is this containment, the disciplined refusal of self-consciousness in a distinctly conscious writer, that led to much of my discomfort when first reading The Secret River. It is a discomfort with the form of the historical novel, arising from the competing demands of history and of the novel. In narrative terms, The Secret River is told almost as ‘straight’ – chronologically, and within the dictates of realism – as an eyewitness account, yet a novel can

4

Kate Grenville, The Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2005): 33–34. Further page references are in the main text.

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never have the force of immediacy or the singular purposiveness that propels personal, non-fictional narrative. Grenville’s discussion of The Secret River in interviews and at literary festivals has emphasized her quest for historical accuracy. Thornhill’s story is based in part on the life of her own ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, a Thames boatman transported to Sydney. Wiseman earned his pardon, like Thornhill, and settled at Wiseman’s Ferry. Grenville uses the language and detail from Wiseman’s court transcript and from other colonial accounts and documents where possible: I did an enormous amount of research for this book. The Secret River isn’t history but it’s based solidly on history: just about everything in the book really happened and much of the dialogue is what people really said or wrote.5

She researched the quotidian experience of early-nineteenth-century London poverty and Sydney settler life in painstaking detail. Descriptions of food, boats, sleeping arrangements, the snatches of direct conversation: all read fluently, surely, and are compelling in their veracity. But I pause when a novelist, especially this novelist, stresses a work’s truth above its fiction. The insistence on accuracy raises, unavoidably, the historical novel’s most tedious, most empirical, question: where does the truth end and the fictionalizing begin? Which elements are fact, and which imagined? If this is a window onto history, am I seeing it as it really was? Such questioning can only be reinforced here by the context of the ‘history wars’. That phrase refers to recent intensely divisive debates in the Australian academy, parliament, and press about the extent of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples and about how this history should be written. Because The Secret River depicts atrocity, one side of the history wars will want to stress the novel’s truth (Grenville used a documented account of a massacre as the basis for her own climactic scene); the other side will cast the book’s conclusion as dramatic hyperbole. The realist historical novel can too easily entrap us in a boring binary of fact versus fiction, rather than exposing the mutual dependence of these terms and the inherently difficult relation between what ‘really’ happened and any attempt to narrate, interpret, and give meaning to what happened. Further, in the realist refusal to play with form 5

Kate Grenville, “On the Historian Within,” Weekend Australian (13–14 August

2005), Review: 2.

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there is also the risk of granting special reverence, and thus distance, to this national myth of first contact and surrounding issues of race.  The discomforts of form here, then, include a sense that ‘historical fact’ and ‘imagined fiction’ are separate, inducing a desire to find the line between. They also include a novelistic urge to pass ethical judgement on our protagonist. The novel is an ideal medium for creating a sense of subjectivity, of individual consciousness. Classic novels take us into the mind of their protagonists, giving us the illusion of witnessing their emotions and their decisionmaking. We see the texture, variety, and limitation of the characters’ thoughts. This genre presents its protagonists’ subjectivity in an ethical context, placing the reader in a position to observe and judge their choices. The novel is an eighteenth-century heuristic device: a means for teaching us by example or counter-example how to be in the modern world. It encourages us to judge and thus shows us how to think and behave ‘reasonably’. In The Secret River, we are immersed in Thornhill’s consciousness. This point of view inevitably raises questions about his intention. In what sense, and within what latitude, does Thornhill make a choice about the novel’s concluding violence? Does he understand what takes place as a massacre, an atrocity, an unpardonable crime? Such questions bring us back to the central impasse of the history wars. As a nation we cannot reach agreement about the degree of settler culpability for Aboriginal suffering. Issues of the settlers’ comprehension and motivation are at the core of this debate. Inga Clendinnen comments on the patchy historical record of settlement violence: We know about a few massacres almost by accident or by luck [. . . ]. [Our national historical] records are thick with tones of voice, references, assumptions, casual remarks that chill our blood. It didn’t chill their blood.6

This telling observation reminds us of the dangers of judging across difference. There were oceans of cultural difference and misunderstanding between early European settlers and Indigenous Australians, but there is also considerable cultural difference between early European settlers and present-

6

Quoted in Jane Sullivan, “Skeletons Out of the Closet,” The Age (2 July 2005), Review: 1–2.

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day readers of The Secret River. Do we judge Thornhill on his own terms or on ours? In a number of interviews about The Secret River, Grenville has stressed that the aim of her fiction is not judgement but empathy. For instance, she spoke to Ramona Koval, on A B C Radio National’s programme Books and Writing, about the antagonists in the history wars: You can set two sides up against each other and ask which side will win, the Windschuttles of the world or the Henry Reynoldses of the world [. . . ]. Or you can [. . . ] say, well, nobody is going to win [. . . ]. What there can be, though, is understanding, actually experiencing what it was like, the choices that these people had [. . . ]. The historians are doing their thing, but let me as a novelist come to it in a different way, which is the way of empathising and imaginative understanding of those difficult events.7

Empathy with the protagonist is a common feature of the novel, but, as noted earlier, a reader of the classic novel is placed in a position of empathetic judgment over the character. So some of my readerly discomfort here arises from the consistent adoption by the narrator of Thornhill’s point of view, encouraging empathy, combined with the novel form’s implicit invitation to weigh and judge. When terrible violence is described, the role of the reader, or witness, becomes disturbingly ambiguous.  I found that The Secret River’s discomforts of form were eased when I began to consider it less as an historical novel and more as borrowing from the genre of tragedy. Of course, tragedy is traditionally a dramatic form; nevertheless, reading The Secret River through the different expectations brought to a tragedy, the different positioning of its viewer or reader, helped me discover a richer relation with this narrative, and perhaps also with the history on which it draws. I was led to consider The Secret River as a tragedy by Grenville’s repeated use of the word ‘tragic’ in interviews. Settler violence, she said to Koval, does not emerge from evil so much as from “a tragic, tragic inability to communicate across a gulf of culture.”8 7

Ramona Koval, “Books and Writing with Ramona Koval,” A B C Radio National (17 July 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm 8 Koval, “Books and Writing.”

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The tragedy is a helpful form for presenting the cultural dissonance and horror of early European–Aboriginal contact because it assumes a degree of absurdity in individual human fate. Unlike the distinctly modern forms of the novel, history, and the historical novel, tragedy does not expect human affairs to be explicable through reason. George Steiner characterizes classical tragedy and its Hellenic world view. For him, the telling contrast is with JudaeoChristian texts, in which he reads an assumption of justice and reason: The Judaic vision sees in disaster a specific moral fault or failure of understanding. The Greek tragic poets assert that the forces which shape or destroy our lives lie outside the governance of reason or justice [. . . ] To the Jew there is a marvelous continuity between knowledge and action; to the Greek an ironic abyss.9

In tragedy, choice does not neatly dovetail with full responsibility. Dramatic irony is produced when we watch a tragic hero choose a course of action deliberately, while we know he or she is blind to its full and terrible consequences. Here is a complication for any analysis of intention: conscious choice with unintended results. Error and explanation are not to be found simply or primarily in the tragic protagonist’s mind – as they might be in the novel – but also in a powerfully chaotic metaphysical order of being that has little mercy for mere mortals. If we read The Secret River as a tragedy, assessing Thornhill’s blameworthiness is no longer our primary concern: he is, by virtue of being a tragic hero, both entirely blameable and struggling exculpably amid overwhelming historical forces and conflicts much larger than himself or his choices. Thornhill’s tragic flaw, his error, is not some hideous moral failing but is, rather, the limitation of an ‘ordinary’ person on an extraordinary historical threshold. If the meeting of two such different cultures were to be peaceful, great imagination would be required. We live for pages in Thornhill’s head, listening to his interior voice, and through this close novelistic knowledge of his subjectivity we apprehend the scope of his insight and adaptability. He is clever: he can imagine a new life in a new place; but he is pragmatic rather than sagaciously humanitarian. He is intellectually illequipped for granting validity to a wholly different way of being. Given his limitations, a tragic resolution of the plot’s tensions is inevitable. To grasp the legitimacy of the Darug and their claims, Thornhill would need a literary form like the novel, presenting their consciousness and culture in terms he under9

George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963): 6–7.

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stood and thus claiming his empathy. But no such form can exist; there is no common language or cultural literacy, and there is no empathy. Rather than judging, our task as readers and witnesses of tragedy is to feel. The conclusion of tragedy is not, as in the novel, about a balancing or resolving of ideas; it is about the release of emotion – what the Greeks termed ‘catharsis’. Kátharsi[s] literally means purging or purifying. Is tragedy, then, a more comfortable genre for this painful history because it holds out the promise of release from guilt, a clearing-out of burdensome emotions? Perhaps white Australia should not be absolved of the burden of judging our past. Perhaps those minor characters in The Secret River who forge a peaceful existence with the Darug are an indication that Thornhill can and should be judged, that, regardless of the extraordinary historical forces in which he is caught, his decisions are personal. But Grenville says that history cannot now be altered, and real reparation is impossible, so our task must be to feel and understand. Lest this task should seem a copout, Terry Eagleton’s recent reflections on tragedy remind us that this genre evokes and encompasses trauma as well as sorrow: “Tragedy may be poignant, but it is supposed to have something fearful about it too, some horrific quality which shocks and stuns.”10 Feeling may not be the easy option. The genre of tragedy, in bringing us closer to feeling, offers distance from the eighteenth-century faith in reason and modernity that is so palpably present in the idea of nation, the trope of progress, and the form of the novel. Tragic drama traditionally tells the story of a great and prosperous individual who, through error and the machinations of fate, loses power and fortune. Loss is crucial. Thus, if we read The Secret River as a tragedy, we undercut its pioneer plot. Emphasis shifts away from the Thornhills’ material progress from poverty to wealth. The wealth is rendered meaningless, because it cannot buy what is desired. Instead, the novel’s trajectory is from hope to hopelessness. At the story’s end, Thornhill is a poignant figure, bewildered by his own sense of irretrievable loss. In the growing tensions with the Darug, he sought certainty – much like late-twentieth-century landowners after Mabo11

10

Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell,

2003): 1. 11

‘Mabo’ refers to a culturally and politically pivotal court case, Mabo v Queensland, which was decided by the High Court of Australia on 8 December 1988. The court ruled that the Queensland government could not retrospectively remove native

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– but in grasping for it he gained greater confusion. He cannot understand why his otherwise perfect pioneer story lacks the expected confident conclusion. Perhaps the story of Australia is not one of pioneer optimism, of hard work forging a nation. Perhaps it is not a story of colonial escape from the British class system to a fairer, more innocent world. Perhaps, instead, it is a tragic, ironic story of limitation, cultural dissonance, and loss.  Thornhill’s boat is called the Hope. His moment of downfall as he travels on hope along the river of history could be regarded as the instant when he falls in love with a stretch of land. For the first half of The Secret River, Thornhill is sustained and driven by his love for Sal: a tender, beautifully written love. Through the second half of the book, the love for the land takes over: A chaos opened up inside him, a confusion of wanting. No one had ever spoken to him of how a man might fall in love with a piece of ground. No one had ever spoken of how there could be this teasing sparkle and dance of light among the trees, this calm clean space that invited feet to enter it. (106)

and He could not forget the quiet ground beyond the screen of reeds and mangroves and the gentle swelling of that point, as sweet as a woman’s body. (121)

Grenville is at her most lyrical and Romantic when she describes the Hawkesbury and its surrounds for us. Thornhill’s love of this landscape demonstrates his admirable, though tragically limited, capacity to embrace difference. For Sal, by contrast, ‘home’ and beauty are always located in England. When Thornhill tells Sal about the land he has seen, she laughs and says he had been so preoccupied she thought he had fallen for “some saucy moll” (122). But this new love of his is so strong, he is determined to hang on to it even against Sal’s wishes. It leads him to commit violence she has warned against and, in an increasing symbolic confusion of the land and the woman, he tells himself this is for her safety. Then something precious is lost from the love that had sustained him: “He had not thought that words unsaid could come between

title, creating anxiety among non-Indigenous land owners who demanded that the Australian government alter the law to provide ‘certainty’ about their land.

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two people like a body of water” (324). Perhaps, after all, The Secret River is a love story. A tragic love story.

WORKS CITED Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Grenville, Kate. The Idea of Perfection (Sydney: Picador, 2000). ——. Joan Makes History (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988). ——. Lilian’s Story (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1986). ——. “On the Historian Within,” Weekend Australian (13–14 August 2005), Review: 2. ——. The Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006). Koval, Ramona. “Books and Writing with Ramona Koval,” A B C Radio National (17 July 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm (accessed 15 August 2009). Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). Sullivan, Jane. “Skeletons Out of the Closet,” The Age (2 July 2005), Review: 1–2.

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History, Fiction, and The Secret River —— S ARAH P INTO

O

N A C O L D S U N D A Y M O R N I N G in August 2009, Kate Grenville talked to a packed audience at the Melbourne Writers Festival about her new novel, The Lieutenant, the second in an historical trilogy. The story of The Lieutenant is, as Grenville explained, based in part on the life and writings of the colonial administrator William Dawes. Born in Portsmouth in 1762, Dawes is a fascinating historical figure of the British Empire in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and is precisely the type of individual in whom historians of Empire are increasingly interested – a second-lieutenant in the Royal Marines in the American War of Independence, a member of the First Fleet, an astronomer, engineer, and surveyor at Sydney Cove, governor of Sierra Leone, anti-slave campaigner, and missionary and educator in Antigua until his death there in 1836.1 As Grenville talked about her research and writing processes for The Lieutenant, it became abundantly clear that she, too, was fascinated by Dawes, particularly by his relationship with a young Indigenous woman, Patyegarang, from whom Dawes learnt the Eora language. Indeed, as she has in many discus-

I would like to thank Leigh Boucher, Marilyn Lake, Bain Attwood and Sue Kossew for taking the time to read and comment upon previous versions of this essay. 1 This paints quite a rosy picture of Dawes, as does Grenville’s novel. Cassandra Pybus, however, has recently argued that Dawes was less than admirable in his actions and character. See Pybus, “ ‘ Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company’: A Transnational Perspective on the Saintly William Dawes,” History Australia 6.1 (April 2009): 12.1–12.7. See also Inga Clendinnen, Dancing With Strangers (Melbourne: Text, 2003); Deidre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British AntiSlavery (New York: Cambridge U P , 2005); and Tim Flannery, “Introduction” to The Birth of Sydney, ed. Flannery (Melbourne: Text, 1999): 1–42.

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sions of this particular novel, Grenville spent far more time examining and explaining the real-life Dawes than she did the fictionalized version of him, Daniel Rooke, whom readers will find in The Lieutenant. What was most noticeable in Grenville’s discussion that morning, however, was her deep fascination with the records Dawes left behind. Although a great deal of Dawes’s papers have been lost, two notebooks from his time in Sydney Cove have survived and can be found in the Library of the School of African and Oriental Studies at King’s College London.2 These notebooks are important and intriguing historical sources, most particularly for their recordings of the Eora language and their insights into the early years of British colonization in Australia.3 As part of her research for The Lieutenant, Grenville travelled to London to view and read the notebooks, and at the Writers Festival that morning she talked with amazement at what she found in them: namely, records of conversations between Dawes and Patyegarang that tantalizingly offered what Grenville described as direct access to the everyday past, in part because they were “not written for anyone that we know of.”4 Perhaps even more significantly, Grenville talked of the allure of the original notebooks as artefacts, particularly of a thumbprint she found on one of the pages, a thumbprint she excitedly thought might belong to Dawes himself. As I listened to Grenville recalling her reaction to the original notebooks, I realized something: Grenville adores the engagement with the past and its traces that comes with history-making. Although she has been increasingly careful to differentiate her writings from those of historians – and, even further, to insist that the excursions into the past in her novels are necessarily fictional – it is clear that Grenville finds everything associated with the writing and making of history to be intensely compelling. She has talked lovingly in recent times of the long and slow slog of archival research, the important contextual insights of wide secondary reading, the gradual accumulation of detailed information about the past, and the strong desire to understand and know something of another time and place, all of which are commonly re2

William Dawes’s notebooks can also be found online at http://www.williamdawes .org/index.html 3 Ross Gibson, “Event-Grammar: The Language Notebooks of William Dawes,” Meanjin 68.2 (Winter 2009): 91–99. 4 Kate Grenville, “Spotlight on Kate Grenville,” Melbourne Writers Festival, Federation Square, Melbourne, 23 August 2009.

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garded as features of historical investigation. “I’m certainly deeply embedded in history,” Grenville commented in an interview marking the release of her earlier historical novel The Secret River. “History has me in its thrall.”5 The release of The Secret River in mid-2005 elicited a great deal more public commentary than did The Lieutenant three years later. Nonetheless, I was a little surprised when Grenville returned to a discussion of the earlier novel, and the debates that surrounded it, during her session at the Writers Festival. And I was even more surprised by the way she talked about those debates, especially her discussion of the public responses of historians to her novel, about which Grenville seemed both shocked and hurt. In doing so, Grenville echoed sentiments she had expressed at the Sydney Writers’ Festival three months earlier during another conversation about The Lieutenant: what I was sad about and angry about was that… what The Secret River was really about seemed to me an important issue – what does it mean to be a white Australian who is descended from that first lot of people who displaced Aboriginal people? But, unfortunately, because of those two historians [Inga Clendinnen and Mark McKenna], all discussion was monopolised by this thing of, you know, “how dare Kate Grenville write about history.”6

Four years and another novel later – and with a third underway – The Secret River was still a topic to which Grenville was anxious to return. Without question, this is in part because interviewers and journalists consistently ask questions about Grenville’s extended body of work, of which The Secret River is a particularly successful and prominent part. It can also be traced, however, to Grenville’s ongoing attempts to clarify her literary and historical project in writing The Secret River, an explanation Grenville likely feels is yet to be heard.7 If the response of the audience at the Sydney Writers’ Festival to Grenville’s (forceful) explanation quoted above is any indication – spontaneous and hearty applause – it seems Grenville’s returns to The Secret River are also connected with an ongoing interest on the part of the reading public 5

Kate Grenville, quoted in Sally Blakeney, “A Writer’s Life: Ideas and Perfection,” Bulletin (12 July 2005): 86–88. 6 Kate Grenville, “Kate Grenville in Conversation,” Sydney Writers’ Festival, Sydney Theatre (24 May 2009), http://www.swf.org.au/podcasts-2009 7 The explanations and clarifications Grenville continues to make that she never intended to write history (or said that she had done so) in The Secret River are obvious and compelling examples of this.

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both in the novel itself and the debates which followed its release. Which begs the question: what was it – and what is it – about this novel that has made it the focus of so much attention?  Published in mid-2005, The Secret River is set in the early years of British colonization in Australia. From the very beginning, this was a novel with a substantial public profile – a profile that would only rise as sales increased, prizes were won, and controversy began to surround it. The novel itself narrates the life of its protagonist, William Thornhill, a character Grenville based on that of her own ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, a waterman who built his fortune on the Hawkesbury River after arriving in New South Wales as a convict.8 The Secret River is what Stella Clarke termed “the novel as national confessional.”9 It revisits and revises mythologized accounts of pioneering triumphs on the frontier, replacing them with conflict, violence, and loss. After outlining Thornhill’s early life in London, the novel gathers momentum with his arrival in New South Wales, accompanied by his wife Sal, in 1806. Working hard to overcome their poverty, William, Sal, and their children are increasingly forced to engage with the ongoing presence of Indigenous peoples throughout the colony, particularly once they take land on the banks of the Hawkesbury. The Thornhills’ attempts to make the land they have claimed their own – to belong – lead almost inevitably to conflict with its Indigenous owners, and William is eventually left with little choice but to join a group of other colonizers in an attack. In the aftermath of the resulting massacre, the novel follows Thornhill into his comfortable but empty old age, where possession does not equate with belonging. Grenville’s novel, then, concludes with a resounding sense of loss and lamentation.10 8

For full details on Wiseman, see Kate Grenville, Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2008). 9 Stella Clarke, “A Challenging Look at the Familiar Territory of Old Australia,” Weekend Australian (25–26 June 2005), Review: 8. 10 The Secret River is “a tragic, ironic story of limitation, cultural dissonance and loss,” according to Eleanor Collins. See Collins, “Poison in the Flour,” Meanjin 65.1 (March 2006): 46. Collins’s slightly revised article is included in the present volume (167–78 above). For an examination of loss and melancholy in the novel itself, see Sarah Pinto, “Emotional Histories and Historical Emotions: Looking at the Past in Historical Novels,” Rethinking History 14.2 (June 2010): 189–207.

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The Secret River was published during a time of significant public and political engagement with the wider project of Australian history. Indeed, the turn of the twenty-first century saw the emergence of a sometimes heated conversation about what was being done with and to the Australian past by governments, politicians, judiciaries, journalists, filmmakers, novelists, educators, museums, and, of course, historians.11 Debates surrounding the release of the Bringing Them Home report into the removal of Indigenous children from their families, the need for a national apology to Indigenous peoples, the structure and content of the newly built National Museum of Australia, the teaching of history in schools, and the academic field of Aboriginal history itself were particularly prominent sites of this conversation. Although these and other moments of discussion – and, indeed, of contestation – might seem a little disparate, they were united by an engagement with a series of questions about the making of Australian history itself: Which Australian stories are being heard? How are these stories being told? Who is doing this telling? And what might it mean to narrate these histories in contemporary Australia? These are questions about more than simply what happened in the past; they are questions about the construction of historical knowledge in contemporary Australia, about what the history of Australia ought to look like. In many ways, it is a conversation that continues today, although perhaps with less prominence than in the recent past. The Secret River spoke directly to the heart of this conversation, not least because its writing was prompted by its key concerns. The novel also provides an answer to the question of what Australian history – in this case, the history of the colonization of New South Wales – should look like: the narration of a past where much is lost and (some) white men must bear responsibility for the destructive consequences of Australia’s colonization. Most significantly, however, discussions of the novel centred on the question of its contribution to the construction of historical knowledge in contemporary Australia. In the aftermath of the publication of The Secret River – particularly once several Australian historians had joined in the public discussions of the novel 11

For examinations of some of these conversations, see: Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005); Ann Curthoys & John Docker, Is History Fiction? (Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2006); and Stuart Macintyre & Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2004).

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– Grenville was increasingly at pains to make a distinction between her novel and histories of Australia’s colonization: “The Secret River isn’t history but its based solidly on history,” she said two months after the novel’s release in mid-2005.12 By early 2007, and in the aftermath of intense criticism of her work, Grenville elaborated on her position: I don’t think The Secret River is history – it’s a work of fiction. Like much fiction, it had its beginnings in the world, but those beginnings have been adapted and altered to various degrees for the sake of the fiction.13

By the time of the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2009, Grenville’s attempts at differentiation were no longer simply about the novel itself, but also about her own position as a writer: “I’m a fiction writer, I’m not a historian […]. I have never claimed to be writing history.”14 Despite these and other disclaimers, there is no question that The Secret River was positioned and understood as a fictional history of colonization, not least because of the ways in which Grenville herself talked about the novel’s background. As Mark McKenna rightly pointed out at the time of the debates, Grenville’s ongoing public explanation of her extensive historical research meant that she couldn’t help but make truth-claims for her novel.15 Grenville consistently spoke of the extensive primary and secondary research she undertook in order to write The Secret River: I began with years of research. I suppose it was about a year and a half of research before I started writing. So I read everything I could read about everything that was relevant to the book, even obliquely relevant, including boats and ships.16

12

Kate Grenville, “The Forum: Kate Grenville on the Historian Within,” Australian (13 August 2005), Review: 2. 13 Kate Grenville, “The Question of History: Response,” Quarterly Essay 25 (2007): 66. 14 Grenville, Sydney Writers’ Festival. 15 Mark McKenna, “Writing the Past,” in The Best Australian Essays 2006, ed. Drusilla Modjeska (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2006): 101. 16 Kate Grenville, “Books and Writing with Ramona Koval,” A B C Radio National (17 July 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm

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She talked of examining the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; of visiting the Mitchell Library in Sydney, where a large number of records and documents about the formation of New South Wales are held; and of reading the work of academic historians, making particular mention of that of Henry Reynolds.17 When it came to her writing process, Grenville talked of “subtly and invisibly” weaving this research into the novel, “between the lines.”18 Throughout this process of imagination, however, it was the “research material” that Grenville relied on for the novel’s tone: “I made excuses to keep going back to the Old Bailey transcripts; what I wanted was to keep hearing that early nineteenth century tone.”19 Grenville is not the only historical novelist – and The Secret River not the only historical novel – to implicitly make claims to truthfulness or historical veracity on the basis of research in this way. Indeed, contemporary Australian historical novels routinely include bibliographical notes outlining the research that underpins them, and authors sometimes make use of literary devices and techniques that foster the notion that their novels offer a kind of truth about their pasts. Grenville’s discussions of the composition of The Secret River, however, were about more than just historical research; she also articulated what amounts to an historical methodology. Along with extensive archival and secondary research, Grenville outlined an approach to investigating the past where attempts to experience some aspects of the lived past became ways to access that past, as Susan Wyndham explained: .

She learned about the settlers’ hardships by using lamb-chop fat to make a gloomy ‘slush lamp,’ eating dry cornmeal bread, chopping hard eucalyptus wood […] [and] was guided through the haunted Hawkesbury bush.20

This archival and experiential research forged a relationship between The Secret River and the real past, even with its fictional status. For Grenville, 17

Susan Wyndham, “A Woman with a Past,” Sydney Morning Herald (9 July

2005), Spectrum: 20; Grenville, cited in Blakeney, “Ideas and Perfection.” 18

Kate Grenville, cited in Rosemary Sorensen, “River of Enchantment,” Courier– Mail (2 July 2005), B A M : 8. 19 Grenville, cited in Blakeney, “Ideas and Perfection.” 20 Wyndham, “A Woman with a Past.” For a critique of this historical methodology see Inga Clendinnen, “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (October 2006): 16–21.

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then, the documents, archives, and experiences that constituted the research for this novel offered insights into the past that could be transcribed into the novel itself: I feel very passionately that this book is probably as close as we are going to get to what it was actually like […] I wanted the book to be based at every point on whatever historical veracity I could find. I haven’t made it up, I just put a novelist’s flesh on the bones of the documents.21

Accompanying The Secret River’s engagement with the past was a wider project Grenville sought for the novel: not only to allow readers to “actually know some of the history”22 of colonization, but also to allow for the possibility that knowledge of that past might have an impact on the present: There are no easy answers to all those questions about land rights and health care and appalling mortality rates [in Indigenous communities] […] They’re all questions that are kind of too hard for everybody, and it seems to me, that in a situation like that, the only thing you can do is go back to the point where it all went wrong.23

These are precisely the type of projects that (academic) historians of national pasts – particularly of contested national pasts like Australia’s – can often be found undertaking in their own work. It is little wonder, then, that The Secret River became the focus of so much specifically historical attention. Although the novel could have been understood and examined in terms of Australia’s long lineage of fictional histories, or as further evidence of the explosion of interest in family history in contemporary Australia, there was (comparatively) little mention of either of these contexts in the public conversations that accompanied its publication. Instead, in the public debates about the book The Secret River came to be ‘about’ not just the history of the colonization of Australia but about the writing and making of Australian history itself, and the entrance of several historians into the conversations that surrounded Gren-

21

Kate Grenville, cited in Jane Sullivan, “Skeletons Out of the Closet,” The Age (2 July 2005), Review: 1. 22 Kate Grenville, quoted in Chris Brice, “Meet the Author: Kate Grenville, Dredging the Past,” Advertiser Magazine (22 July 2006): 9. 23 Kate Grenville, quoted in Diane Stubbings, “Picking Up the Dropped Stitches of Our History,” Canberra Times (24 September 2005), Panorama: 12.

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ville’s novel took place within this context. The novel prompted the public contemplation of the ways in which history should be made and told, of what history should be. As such, the ways in which some historians responded to The Secret River reveal something about understandings of historical knowledge – of Australian history – in contemporary Australia.  Almost from the moment of its release, The Secret River was brought into an already established conversation about history-making in Australia. The novel was immediately placed within the context of Australia’s so-called ‘history wars’, a series of controversies usually understood as disputes between and among historians about the validity of several grand narratives of Australian history.24 “The history wars could flare up again […] with the publication of a new novel by Kate Grenville,” began an article on the front page of the The Age in the week of the novel’s release.25 Grenville was subsequently asked where her “loyalty lies”26 in the wars; the novel was directly compared to the work of historians like Henry Reynolds, Inga Clendinnen, and Manning Clark; and historians themselves were sought for comment on its historymaking project. Keith Windschuttle was less than enthusiastic about the possibilities of the novel, arguing that battles over Australia’s pasts had “gone beyond a case where a fictionalised account is going to make any impact.”27 Inga Clendinnen, however, was far more positive in her assessment, likening Grenville’s methods to those of historians who “imaginatively create” the “plausible circumstances” of the past, and offering the novel a level of legitimacy: “It’s the enterprise I think that is good. I would like to think it will extinguish the history wars, to a degree.”28 It would be another six months, however, before historians began to engage critically with the novel and the discussions it prompted. Those historians who contributed to the public conversations – McKenna and Clendinnen were the most prominent, but they were also joined by Helen MacDonald, John Hirst, and Alan Atkinson, among others – are a relatively diverse group 24

Macintyre & Clarke, History Wars. Sullivan, “Skeletons Out of the Closet.” 26 Wyndham, “A Woman with a Past.” 27 Keith Windschuttle, quoted in Sullivan, “Skeletons Out of the Closet.” 28 Inga Clendinnen, quoted in Sullivan, “Skeletons Out of the Closet.” 25

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of scholars working in the area of Australian history.29 What they do have in common, however, is a very literary approach to historical writing; all have written books with appeal to a wider readership than academic or professional historians.30 Indeed, all have written what McKenna himself might call literary histories.31 These historians had much to say about The Secret River, and particularly about the way Grenville talked about her process of composition. What is most interesting about their criticisms of both Grenville and of her novel, however, is the picture they construct – a picture that is built against both novel and author – of the historical project in contemporary Australia. First and foremost, the historians insist on a fundamental and immutable divide between history and fiction. In a thoughtful article prompted by – rather than speaking directly to – the Secret River debates in the Weekend Australian, for example, Helen MacDonald acknowledged that “histories and historical novels are not as distinct as they have come to seem.” Nevertheless, for MacDonald there remains a clear division between the two, based not only on the type of research underpinning each discipline but also on the function of evidence within the reconstructions of the past that take place within them: “There is a point beyond which historians will not go, however, for history is an evidence-based discipline and, unlike novelists, historians are not free to invent the past.”32 McKenna made a very similar point in his various contributions to the public conversations surrounding The Secret River. He was the first historian to engage in a substantial critique of Grenville’s novel and project, part of a much larger argument about the decline of critical history in Australian public

29

Although Clendinnen’s research has been predominantly on Aztec and Mayan cultures, her history of first contact in Australia, Dancing with Strangers, brought her very much into the realm of Australian history. 30 Examples include: Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place (Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2002); Clendinnen, Dancing with strangers; Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2005); John Hirst, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 2000); Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1997). 31 McKenna, “Writing the Past,” 109. I would like to thank Bain Attwood for pointing my thinking in this direction in response to an alternative version of this essay. 32 Helen MacDonald, “Novel Views of History,” Weekend Australian (25–26 March 2006), Review: 5.

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life. For McKenna, the rise of the historical novelist as historical authority in contemporary Australia has been accompanied by a concomitant diminution in the authority and legitimacy of historians; Grenville and her Secret River, then, are a symptom of what he sees as a much wider malaise.33 In such a context, maintaining the dividing lines between history and fiction could not be more vital, according to McKenna: Fiction has historical elements, history has fictive elements, but fiction should not be claimed as history. All writers and critics have an obligation to remember to distinguish between the two. Most of all, we owe this distinction to our readers.34

Clendinnen went even further than McKenna in her insistence on the significance of the division between history and fiction. Clendinnen’s criticisms of The Secret River, particularly her interrogation of Grenville’s historical methodology, was largely premised on an understanding of the differences between history and fiction. According to Clendinnen, history and fiction necessarily reside on opposite sides of a ravine that must stay firmly in view: You’re allowed to play games if you’re clearly on your side of the ravine […]. Thousands of people will read The Secret River and get some knowledge of their past. That’s great – as long as it’s kept in the fiction section.

Of course, Grenville has insisted that this is precisely where The Secret River belonged, and that she never intended her novel to be mistaken for history. What Clendinnen viewed as the blurring of the line between history and fiction in evidence in The Secret River’s writing and reception, however, was for her a problem; not only does this render the novel “not history” but it makes it what Clendinnen goes so far as to call “anti-history.”35 Clearly, the publication of The Secret River prompted a public assertion on the part of some historians of the fundamental difference between history and fiction; according to their formulations, neither can approximate to the other

33

See: Mark McKenna, “Comfort History,” Australian (18 March 2006), Review: 15; Mark McKenna, “Writing the Past,” Australian Financial Review (16 December 2005), Review: 1; McKenna, “Writing the Past,” Best Australian Essays. 34

McKenna, “Writing the Past,” Australian Financial Review. Inga Clendinnen, quoted in Jane Sullivan, “Making a Fiction of History…,” The Age (21 October 2006), A2: 12. 35

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in any substantive way. In their eyes, the basis of this fundamental divide can be found in the relationship that only history can have to what these historians describe as the “real past.” Indeed, the possibility of access to a real, authentic, and truthful past haunts the engagements of these historians’ with The Secret River. As Stella Clarke noted at the time, this is in many ways a surprising feature of these articulations of the historical project, given the wide and ongoing discussions, both within and beyond the discipline of history, of the “constructed nature of truth” that have accompanied postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial scholarship in recent times.36 Nevertheless, the notion that we might differentiate between history and fiction on the basis of history’s ‘truthful’ engagement in non-fictional historical writing were rarely made strongly.37 Indeed, even Grenville herself has articulated this division, constructing history as a discipline with the potential to access more closely a real and available past in the process. For Grenville, then, historians and novelists have different interests: “Mine is to put flesh on history’s skeleton; the historian’s, which is equally valuable, is to burrow into the relics and archives and tease out some sense of reality of meaning from them.” 38 Alan Atkinson gestures towards this preoccupation with the real in a response to Clendinnen’s Quarterly Essay that is largely concerned with the relationship between scholarship and journalism: “The task of teaching and of writing history is to persuade students and readers that the past is equally real

36

Stella Clarke, “Havoc in History House,” Australian (4 March 2006), Review: 8. Certainly, both McKenna and Clendinnen gesture towards the gap between history – a representation of the past – and the real or lived past itself that has often been the focus of postmodern or poststructural critiques; see, for example, Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History, with a new preface and conversation with the author Alun Munslow (London: Routledge, 2003); Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2006); and, for a more Australian-centred discussion, see Penny Russell, “Almost Believing: The Ethics of Historical Imagination,” in The Historian’s Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History, ed. Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2004): 106–17. These gestures, however, are by no means the focus of their discussions. 38 Grenville, cited in Murray Waldren, “Award ‘vindicates’ writer’s obsession,” Australian (15 March 2006): 3. Interestingly, the paucity of historical evidence and information about the life of her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, is one of the reasons Grenville offers for writing The Secret River as fiction rather than history. See Brice, “Meet the Author,” Advertiser Magazine. 37

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with the present,” he writes.39 Both Clendinnen and McKenna, however, made the relationship between history and the so-called real past far more explicit, and significant. The “ravine” of difference between history and fiction, according to Clendinnen, is based on history’s “advantage” and “burden” of “dealing with the real.” Unlike novelists, who are free to manipulate and manufacture events and characters at will, historians “are concerned with what men and women have actually done.”40 This is a sentiment echoed by McKenna, albeit with a slightly different focus: “Unlike the novelist, the historian is tied to the limits of the archive, to real contexts, places and time.”41 Taken together, these statements demonstrate the significance attributed to the ability to gain access to a real past claimed by these historians as unique to history and, presumably, as a result of the proper use of historical techniques of research and analysis. And further, according to these historians, it is this relationship that allows history – in sharp contrast to fiction – access to historical truth. As McKenna puts it, That fiction is capable of unearthing powerful insights and truths into our history is a given, but ultimately history, unlike fiction, is the only place where claims to historical truth can be tested and verified.42

The relationship outlined by McKenna and Clendinnen between the historical project and a real, authentic, or truthful past bestows on historians a particular responsibility to that past which simply does not apply to writers of fiction, historical or otherwise.43 In contrast to historians, whose work is directed by the past, novelists like Grenville respond to contemporary imperatives in the composition of their fictional histories, directed in their writings not by the past or its sources, but by their own interests, as well as the (anticipated) interests of their audiences. John Hirst explained what he considered to be The Secret River’s historical project in precisely these terms: as a proble39

Alan Atkinson, “The History Question: Correspondence,” Quarterly Essay 24 (2006): 58. 40 Clendinnen, “The History Question,” 30–31. 41 McKenna, “Comfort History.” 42 “Comfort History.” 43 For a discussion of the relationship between historians’ responsibilities to the people of the past and people of the present, see Marilyn Lake, “On History and Politics,” in The Historian’s Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History, ed. Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2004): 94–105.

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matic example of the imposition of present-day concerns – in this case, what Hirst labels the “liberal imagination” – on and into the past. Grenville’s discussion of her own historical methodology sees her “ponder what she would have done on the frontier”; as such, the “leading character in her novel is not an 18th-century waterman at all; it is herself.”44 Whereas historians have a responsibility to “account for, verify and defend the historical validity” of their histories, novelists are “ultimately not responsible to historical sources”; they are responsible instead to their readers.45 Indeed, the novelist’s “only binding contract” is “with their readers, and that ultimately is not to instruct or reform, but to delight.”46 In contrast, writers of history have a responsibility to the past: to refrain from manipulating historical sources around the needs or concerns of the present, and consequently to offer the past as it was. The moment the sense of this responsibility is lost is a moment of real concern, whatever the circumstances: “the risk is that historians’ primary responsibility will be understood to be to the present and the future of the nation and not to the past,” according to Clendinnen.47 This is not to suggest, however, that the historical project as it was articulated by these historians in their responses to the publication of The Secret River is entirely divorced from present-day concerns. On the contrary, there is a sense of responsibility to the present in these responses, and it is a responsibility that is framed by the truthful and faithful depiction of the past. For Clendinnen, for example, the writers of history have a responsibility to recognize and understand the kind of choices available to the people of the past in order to be better able to identify the real choices before us now […]. We have to know the world as it is if we are to change any part of it, and to map the span for human agency so we do not acquiesce in what we could change.48

44

John Hirst, “Forget Modern Views When Bringing Up the Past,” Australian (20 March 2006): 10. For an extended version of the argument he put forward here, see his Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2006): 80–103. 45 McKenna, “Writing the Past,” Australian Financial Review. 46 Clendinnen, “The History Question,” 31. 47 Clendinnen makes this comment with reference to the increasingly difficult funding environment faced by historians in the academy (“The History Question,” 45). 48 Grenville, “The History Question,” 66.

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McKenna ventured even further than Clendinnen, arguing that the specificity of contemporary Australia made the depiction of a real and truthful past – and resistance to the lure of fictional histories – all the more crucial: In Australia, a nation still so uncertain and divided about its past, in which history that is critical of the nation struggles to be heard over the constant din of national self-congratulation, we need to resist any tendency to embrace historical fiction as a substitute national history. To fail to do so is to snuggle up to a depoliticised and mythical past.49

For these historians, however, fulfilling this responsibility to depict the real past truthfully is possible only when distance between the historian and the past is maintained and protected. One of the strongest criticisms by these historians of Grenville’s articulation of her novel’s project, then, was the way she seemed to be attempting to imagine herself out of her present and back into the past. Going back, however, is impossible, as Hirst explains: Grenville cannot imagine how she would have behaved on the Hawkesbury frontier because unlike the Hawkesbury settlers she does not believe in savagery, European superiority and conquest. The pioneer settlers are not ourselves.50

This belief in the need for distance in the writing of history explains Clendinnen’s criticisms of Grenville’s discussion of empathy; in this formulation, empathy implies the kind of closeness that can only impede historical understanding.51 In essence, this is the distinction these historians make between the versions of the past found in history and those found in fiction: History’s truth is the chance to understand human experience as it can never be lived, from above and afar, looking back, understanding the human condition because we are not there, because we are not surrounded by the fog or immediacy of experience […] History relies on distance while fiction tries constantly to break that distance down, to create the illusion that the reader is there, and therefore knows what the past was like.52 49

McKenna, “Writing the Past,” in Best Australian Essays, 110. Hirst, “Forget Modern Views.” Clendinnen says something very similar: ‘We cannot post ourselves back in time. People really did think differently then – or at least we must proceed on that assumption” (“The History Question,” 20). 51 Clendinnen, “The History Question,” 20–23. 52 McKenna, “Writing the Past,” Australian Financial Review. For a discussion of distance and history, see the special issue of History Workshop Journal on “Historical 50

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 The Secret River is one of the most significant historical novels to have been published in Australia in recent times, not least because of the persistence of the discussions provoked by it. Grenville’s novel attracted so much attention because it offered a focus for a discussion of the historical project in Australia at a time when an interrogation of this project held so much importance. In debates about The Secret River, this project was cast in terms of a fundamental and identifiable division between history and fiction that rested largely on the claim that history’s approach to the past enables it to speak with precisely the type of authority, legitimacy, and truthfulness needed in the mythologizing contexts of contemporary Australia. McKenna has suggested that one of the consequences of Australia’s history wars has been an erosion of the cultural authority historians previously held in relation to the past; the trustworthiness of historians has been diminished in contemporary Australia as a result, and history “has been the great loser” in this process. As a consequence, historians can no longer be relied on to speak truthfully about the past in public discourse. Instead, they are “cast in the partisan image of federal politics, as cultural warriors peddling rival versions of the truth.”53 It seems to me that the discussions of Australian history that accompanied the publication of The Secret River demonstrate that the history wars affected more than just historians; they have also had consequences for the ways in which the historical project might be understood in contemporary Australia. The assertion of a largely unquestioned relationship between historical knowledge and the real or the true establishes history as a rigidly bounded discipline tied directly and incontrovertibly to its sources and an accessible and available past. Within such a framework, there seems to be little space for the acknowledgement of – or, indeed, engagement with – the uncertainty and fragility of historical methods, knowledge, and understanding. In a sense, the limitations on this space can be seen in the very articulation of the historical project the present essay has sought to track, within which men-

Imagination” 57 (Spring 2004). And, for a compelling look at the increasing importance of intimacy and proximity in historical writing, see Mark Salber Phillips, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life,” History Workshop Journal 65 (2008): 49–64. 53 McKenna, “Writing the Past.” McKenna is drawing on the work of Curthoys & Docker and Attwood when he makes this analysis.

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tion of the tenuousness of historical knowledge is dwarfed by the articulation of its truthful and certain relationship to the ‘real’ past. “To embrace uncertainty and ambiguity is the historian’s special duty,” according to Clendinnen. “But if history is to inform present choices – to make them both more intelligent and more compassionate, as I believe it can – it must abide by the iron rules of the discipline.”54 In one sense, it is all-too-easy to regard these historians’ critiques of The Secret River as relatively transparent attempts to reassert their own authority and legitimacy in the face of the onslaught of fictional histories – and fictional historians – of all kinds in contemporary Australia. So, too, it is tempting to dismiss their articulations of a (relatively) concrete and stable divide between history and fiction as tenuous at best in the face of the various ways in which the solidity of this division has been undone in poststructural, postmodern and postcolonial scholarship of recent decades. To do so, however, would be to miss something important about the debates surrounding Grenville’s novel. Writing before the publication of The Secret River, Iain McCalman suggested that an “unexpected casualty” of Australia’s history wars might be “a forced cooling of relations between fiction and history” accompanied by a need for historians to engage in experimental histories with more care than they might have in the past, sentiments that have been echoed and expanded by Ann Curthoys and John Docker.55 McCalman’s comments have in many ways been borne out in recent publications in Australian history that, while literary in tone, are based on such detailed and comprehensive archival work. The debates that surrounded The Secret River seem to suggest that something else has also been lost: an acknowledgement not only that it might be possible to situate historical work in Clendinnen’s “ravine,” but also that opening the space to do so might be productive, particularly given that this seems to be precisely the kind of space Aboriginal historians, writers, and activists have long argued warrants historical legitimacy.

54

Clendinnen, “The History Question,” 67. Iain McCalman, “Flirting with Fiction,” in The Historian’s Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History, ed. Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2004): 151–61; Curthoys & Docker, Is History Fiction? 55

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WORKS CITED Atkinson, Alan. The Europeans in Australia: A History (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1997). Attwood, Bain. Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005). Blakeney, Sally. “A Writer’s Life: Ideas and Perfection,” Bulletin (12 July 2005): 86– 88. Bradley, James. “The History Question: Correspondence,” Quarterly Essay 24 (December 2006): 72–76. Brice, Chris. “Meet the Author: Kate Grenville, Dredging the Past,” Advertiser Magazine (22 July 2006): 9. Clarke, Stella. “A Challenging Look at the Familiar Territory of Old Australia,” Weekend Australian (25–26 June 2005), Review: 8. ——. “Havoc in History House,” Australian (4 March 2006), Review: 8. Clendinnen, Inga. Dancing with Strangers (Melbourne: Text, 2003). ——. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (October 2006): 2–72. Coleman, Deidre. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (New York: Cambridge U P , 2005). Collins, Eleanor. “Poison in the Flour,” Meanjin 65.1 (March 2006): 38–47. Curthoys, Ann, & John Docker. Is History Fiction? (Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2006). Flannery, Tim, ed. The Birth of Sydney (Melbourne: Text, 1999). Gibson, Ross. “Event-Grammar: The Language Notebooks of William Dawes,” Meanjin 68.2 (Winter 2009): 91–99. Grenville, Kate. “Kate Grenville in Conversation,” Sydney Writers’ Festival, Sydney Theatre (24 May 2009), http://www.swf.org.au/podcasts-2009 ——. Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2008). ——. “Spotlight on Kate Grenville,” Melbourne Writers Festival, Federation Square, Melbourne (23 August 2009). ——. “The Forum: Kate Grenville on the Historian Within,” Australian (13 August 2005), Review: 5. ——. “The Question of History: Response,” Quarterly Essay 25 (February 2007): 66–72. Hirst, John. “Forget Modern Views When Bringing up the Past,” Australian (20 March 2006): 10. ——. Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2006). ——. The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 2000). Jenkins, Keith. Re-Thinking History, with a new preface and conversation with the author Alun Munslow (London: Routledge, 2003).

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Koval, Ramona. “Books and Writing with Ramona Koval,” A B C Radio National (17 July 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm Lake, Marilyn. “On History and Politics,” in The Historian’s Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History, ed. Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2004): 94–105. McCalman, Iain. “Flirting with Fiction,” in The Historian’s Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History, ed. Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2004): 151–61. MacDonald, Helen, Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2005). ——. “Novel Views of History,” Weekend Australian (25–26 March 2006): R14–15. Macintyre, Stuart, & Anna Clark. The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2004). McKenna, Mark. “Comfort History,” Australian (18 March 2006): R15. ——. Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place (Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2002). ——. “Writing the Past,” Australian Financial Review (16 December 2005): R1–2. Repr. in The Best Australian Essays 2006, ed. Drusilla Modjeska (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2006): 96–110. Munslow, Alun. Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2006). Phillips, Mark Salber. “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life,” History Workshop Journal 65 (2008): 49–64. Pinto, Sarah. “Emotional Histories and Historical Emotions: Looking at the Past in Historical Novels,” Rethinking History 14.2 (June 2010): 189–207. Pybus, Cassandra. “ ‘ Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company’: A Transnational Perspective on the Saintly William Dawes,” History Australia 6.1 (April 2009): 12.1–12.7. Russell, Penny. “Almost Believing: The Ethics of Historical Imagination,” in The Historian’s Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History, ed. Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2004): 106–17. Sorensen, Rosemary. “River of Enchantment,” Courier–Mail (2 July 2005): B A M 8. Sullivan, Jane. “Making a Fiction of History…,” The Age (21 October 2006): A2, A12–13. ——. “Skeletons Out of the Closet,” The Age (2 July 2005), Review: 1–2. Stubbings, Diane. “Picking Up the Dropped Stitches of Our History,” Canberra Times (24 September 2005), Panorama: 12–13. Waldren, Murray. “Award ‘vindicates’ writer’s obsession,” Australian (15 March 2006): 3. Wyndham, Susan. “A Woman with a Past,” Sydney Morning Herald (9 July 2005), Spectrum: 20.

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Learning From Each Other Language, Authority and Authenticity in Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant 1

—— L YNETTE R USSELL

O

I have, on and off, tried to learn a few sentences of an Aboriginal language from Western Victoria. My guides through this have been linguists and language experts who have spent literally decades trying to re-create and reinvigorate a language that was virtually extinct. Their guides have been the word books, notes, journals, and musings of early travellers, missionaries, and ethnographers and the few recorded voices housed in the language files of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra. Learning an Aboriginal language is a difficult – very difficult – task. My tongue seems to not understand where it should rest in my mouth; behind my lower teeth, in my palate or along the edge of my bite? As I have struggled with words that seem a strange yet wonderful collection of vowel sounds linked to unexpected consonants (clicking gs and soft ds) I marvel at the complexity and beauty of this language I desire to know. And I lament my own inability to do justice to a lexicon that sounds so lyrical that I feel I should attempt to sing it rather than merely struggle to speak it. Kate Grenville, in her novel The Lieutenant, has also consulted the word books and journals as her main character, Lieutenant Rooke, resolves to learn the language of the Gadigal people mediated through his friendship with a

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VER THE PAST FEW YEARS

I would like to thank David Kershaw Haworth for drawing my attention to the work of Angela Carter. My gratitude to Kate Grenville for her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and her commitment to honesty in both. Victoria Haskins for reading an earlier draft of this essay, and Ian McNiven for the endless conversations and support.

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young girl called Tagaran. Rooke is based on William Dawes, a First Fleet naval officer, astronomer, and scientist who set up camp just on the fringe of the embryonic Sydney settlement, where he was to observe the southern skies and map the constellations. Dawes was also to take regular readings of the temperature and describe the weather patterns. His campsite was visited by local Aboriginal people and Dawes befriended Patyegarang, a young Gadigal girl, whom we believe to have been between twelve and fifteen years old. Patyegarang and Dawes taught each other their respective languages. This process and its results were recorded by Dawes in his notebooks, now owned by the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.2 Grenville has drawn on these for her imaginative narrative of the early days of the colony. Grenville uses the Gadigal language terms and sentences throughout the novel.3 This approach, rare in Australian fiction, allows the reader to delight in Gadigal language as its melody ripples through the text. As the historian Sam Furphy notes: “Aboriginal names [and we might add words more generally] have often been described as pleasant sounding, melodious or euphonious.” 4 Grenville certainly catches this melody and uses it to great effect. There is a sense of experimentation as Lt Rooke tries to pronounce words that his tongue (like mine) finds foreign. For readers entrenched in the world of Western knowledge, Rooke’s methodical and scientific mind is familiar: we recognize his need to find logic within the chaos of the cosmos and we understand how he then applies this to mapping the language. We marvel at Tagaran’s playfulness, her confidence, and her intellect, her certainty as someone who is firmly ‘at home’ in her ‘country’. In this essay I want to explore the role of language in mediating the friendship between Rooke and Tagaran and how this might stand as an allegory for the relationships between black and white Australians more generally.

2

William Dawes, Grammatical forms of the language of N.S. Wales, in the neighbourhood of Sydney (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1790). Manuscript, Marsden Collection 41645a. Also William Dawes, Vocabulary of the language of N.S. Wales, in the neighbourhood of Sydney (Native and English) (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1790–91). Manuscript, Marsden Collection 41645b. The William Dawes notebooks have been digitized and are available on the internet at http://www.williamdawes.org/ 3 Sam Furphy, “Aboriginal House Names and Settler Australian Identity,” Journal of Australian Studies 72 (2002): 61. 4 Furphy, “Aboriginal House Names and Settler Australian Identity,” 61.

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For the most part, settler Australians have not endeavoured to learn or use Aboriginal languages apart from lyrical-sounding place names, the meanings of which are often forgotten.5 The historian and novelist Tony Birch has argued that the use of Aboriginal names for “houses, streets, suburbs and whole cities,” unreflexively and certainly without sanction or permission, is an exercise in cultural appropriation, which represents imperial possession and the quaintness of the ‘native.’ For the colonisers to attach a ‘native’ name to a place does not represent or recognise an indigenous history, and therefore possible indigenous ownership.6

Grenville’s Rooke attempts to learn and then use Gadigal language. Yet for Rooke this is not a simple act of appropriation: indeed, his desire to know the Other’s language depends on a relationship with Gadigal people, most notably with Tagaran. This suggests an engagement that is not easily categorized as simply colonialist. Learning language, as Rooke attempts to do, requires him to accept a position of subservience to his ‘native’ teachers. In order to do this, he must enter into a relationship with them. Importantly, within this relationship there is (however momentarily or fleetingly) equality. These are stories of interaction and engagement that belong to both Indigenous and settler Australians, and their telling and retelling ought be seen as an exercise in reconciliation. These are stories in which we all have a stake.

Fiction, History, Language Although Grenville has based Rooke on William Dawes and has drawn on his diaries and notebooks, it is important to note her warning that the novel The Lieutenant “should not be mistaken for history.”7 In an extended author’s note she observes: “This is a work of fiction” (305). These declarations may well have been motivated by the historian Inga Clendinnen’s vitriolic attack on Grenville’s previous novel, The Secret River.8 For Clendinnen, The Secret River had strayed too close to what the professional historian regarded as 5

“Aboriginal House Names and Settler Australian Identity,” 60. Tony Birch, “Nothing has Changed: The Making and Unmaking of Koori Culture,” Meanjin 51.2 (1992): 234. 7 Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant (Melbourne: Text, 2008): 307. Further page references are in the main text. 8 Inga Clendinnen, “The History Question: Who Owns The Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (October 2006): 16–17. 6

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‘history’. While this could be seen as a debate about disciplinary boundaries – the novelist vis-à-vis the historian – it is more complex than a simple turf war. James Bradley, in his response to Clendinnen, questions Clendinnen’s implication that Grenville’s historical fiction is consumed as, or purported to be, “something closer to fictional documentary than fiction.”9 Bradley suggests that Clendinnen gives surprisingly little attention to the qualities which actually make fiction live – an appreciation of the possibilities of language; the strange mimetic power of words to grant a kind of life to the presences which inhabit the text; its capacity for transformation and metamorphosis.10

Grenville’s narrative is a kind of repossessed history; she has consulted the historical archives (the historical record) but she has transmogrified it. The source material is recognizable but the story is clearly imagined. Grenville fully recognizes the line separating history from historical fiction and from fictional documentary. Indeed, she documents her shifting thinking frankly and honestly in her book Searching for the Secret River. She writes about the past, not about history.11 This might seem to be an exercise in semantics: it is not. For Grenville, at times her work is a kind of experiential imagined thinking about the past. What she means by this is not quite the same as what historians mean when they use of the word ‘history’. Hers is an imaginative engagement with the past, in many ways not unlike Greg Dening’s differentiation between the doing and the writing of history: History is never a tidy thing, just reconstructing the past; the past is represented, with a hyphen between the ‘re’ and the ‘present’. It’s represented and you need the creative imagination for that.12

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James Bradley, “The History Question: Correspondence,” Quarterly Essay 24 (December 2006): 72. 10 Bradley, “The History Question: Correspondence,” 73. 11 Kate Grenville, Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006): 47. Further page references are in the main text. 12 Greg Dening, “A Library Sailor: An Interview with Greg Dening,” Limina 7 (2001): 5. This interview provides an excellent overview of Dening’s ideas on history, historical truths, and narratives.

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Grenville is not writing history per se, but she may well be doing it in her research and preparation. Experiential imagining about the past is not the exclusive domain of historians. In Searching for the Secret River, Grenville recalls a conversation with the Bundjalung author Melissa Lucashenko. Grenville reflects that, when asked what she describes as “the simplest question in the world” (27–28) – the question of where she was from – she struggled to answer and, when she did, she noted that her convict ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, “[…] took up land on the Hawkesbury.” “What do you mean ‘took up’?” [Lucashenko …] said. “He took.”

This moment seems to create in Grenville an epiphanic epistemological shift as she reflects that what she had thought of as “small and harmless words. Family. From. Took up […] were turning out to be grenades” (29). Language is power and it can unexpectedly change direction, turning, as it were, on the speakers themselves. It is not, however, only the language of the colonizers that can be contentious. In south-eastern Australia, few aspects of Aboriginal culture have become as disputed as language and the use of language terms.13 For the most part, the Aboriginal languages of south-eastern Australia were savagely reduced in number by colonialism. Indeed, across Australia, Indigenous languages were reduced from over 250 to fewer than sixty. Mission and government policies banning the use of indigenous languages all but ensured the extinction of numerous unique languages and dialects. Few languages survived and fewer are spoken across contemporary Australia. Today, no more than twenty Aboriginal languages are considered to be strong.14 There have been, however, some very successful and innovative reclamation and reinvigoration projects, but these have not been without significant tension and criticism. The importance of language for contemporary Aboriginal people should be understood as critical to their ongoing cultural revitalization. I once had a Navajo elder tell me that “without [your traditional] language you are no-one” – and as no-one you can make no claims to a cultural identity. Similar sentiments can be found in some Australian communities. 13

See Tony Birch, “Nothing has Changed: The Making and Unmaking of Koori Culture,” 234. 14 An important site for much information on Australia Aboriginal Languages can be found at: http://www.fatsil.org.au/LANGUAGES/Languages/

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Following Angela Carter, I believe that “language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.”15 In the face of language extinction, the questions of who has the right to learn or teach these languages are pertinent. For languages that are no longer spoken but remembered only as fragments – the occasional noun, the odd verb – the skills of linguists and historical language specialists have been imperative. Of course, because for the most part these scholars are not themselves Indigenous and their expertise creates a power differential, this has become highly politicized. In turn, this has led to questions of authenticity, authority, and the right to speak. Some of the most impassioned arguments I have witnessed have been about the authenticity of language and the authority to use it. I have observed some communities exercising control over all aspects of the language, arguing that only those who can demonstrate a narrowly defined familial link to the tribe or culture group should be permitted to learn it. For these community leaders, their language has become a precious treasure which must be protected and locked away to ensure its value. Other communities have taken a contrary view, instead arguing that language reclamation and survival is enhanced by many speakers, be they Aboriginal or not. In both cases, however, there is no doubt that the teachers of these languages have significant power. This power is also present in Grenville’s The Lieutenant as Lt Rooke attempts to learn the Gadigal language. From his isolated makeshift laboratory, Rooke, as a scientist, attempts to map and understand the skies and the weather patterns in the unfamiliar Antipodean landscape. Somewhat aloof, Rooke exhibits a personality type that would be comfortable even in today’s academe. He is the reticent, almost shy scholar, who understands books much better than he does people. He manages to live far enough away from the convict colony not to have to travel back each day for meals and supplies. Solitude suits him and he finds solace in his bush laboratory. When visited by local Aboriginal people, Rooke is at first self-doubting and unconfident: it seems he is no more comfortable among these strangers than he is among the officers and men of the First Fleet. Rooke tries to convince himself that the next time he encounters Aboriginal people “he would not be shy” (71). Rooke’s methodical approach involves his entering his thoughts into a journal, measuring star movements and looking for patterns in the weather and the celestial sky. His is a measured and controlled life. 15

Angela Carter, “Notes from the Front Line” (1983), in Carter, Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings, ed. Jenny Uglow (1997; Harmondsworthn: Penguin, 1998): 43.

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His interest in learning and recording the Gadigal language is fostered by the inquisitive and clever Tagaran. Although only a young girl, she has much more confidence and bravado than Rooke. As Rooke learns from Tagaran, he also begins to shed some of his control and some of his shyness. Rooke applies himself to the task of learning Gadigal with his familiar methodical approach. He soon realizes that learning a language as an adult is difficult. English speakers attempting to learn a European, Latin, Germanic or Romance language are at least familiar with the sounds. The use of the Roman alphabet ensures that written versions of the language have some familiarity. Lt Rooke, however, was not merely trying to collect the words of the Aboriginal language; he was trying to acquire, record, notate, and learn it. He knew that “language was more than a list of words, more that a collection of fragments all jumbled together like a box of nuts and bolts” (152). Language is expression, and Rooke wants to speak Gadigal. He wants to converse with Tagaran. And Tagaran as his teacher plays a crucial role. Although she is by far his junior, a mere child, it quickly becomes evident that she is master and patient teacher to his clumsy but diligent student. The desire to learn her language means that Rooke must again become a child, an infant. It is as if he were learning to speak for the first time. His tongue does not know where to sit in order to produce sounds that are both unfamiliar and unrecognizable. He recognizes the difficulties as he tries to copy the sounds of the Aboriginal man Warungin: his words shape “a formless bubble of language such as an infant might make” (141). With Tagaran, he attempts to imitate her speech, as she slowly and carefully repeats the words she wants him to understand: “It was like being taken by the hand and helped step by step in the dark” (149). The process is frustratingly slow, as the sounds are so completely foreign: Even when he had it, it was not a perfect copy. There was something smothered or woolly, a slurring or legato quality to the word that he could not imitate. He could hear it, but his mouth did not know how to make it. (149)

But Tagaran does more than merely speak the language of the land. Rooke recognizes, as Tagaran silently slips away from his camp, that her literacy is written across the land. She can read the landscape, she knows animal tracks, the way the rocks lie, the signs of the sky and the stories that accompany them. She is at home. As he tries to map the southern and unfamiliar sky, she sees the familiar signs and knows the narratives that he cannot read. He

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speaks the babble of a baby and is blinded to much of this other level of language, confined to marks on paper, scratchings that have meaning. Yet it is not an unreflective ignorance: he knows that “language was a machine. To make it work, each part had to be understood in relation to all the other parts” (152). He is aware that he knows very little. To Tagaran, Rooke becomes ‘Kamara’ which he interprets as meaning ‘friend’. He reflects that “Kamara must have existed all this time, […] but without the remarkable chance of the arrival of Tagaran, he would still be voiceless” (189). Perhaps Grenville here is again tapping into the idea that the language and the land are intimately connected. Rooke’s immersion in language and the land was “to enter that strangeness and lose himself in it” (139). It was to become Kamara in the only place where Kamara existed. In this, Rooke’s desire was not to merely ‘learn’ language, to name places, people, and things. His wish was to understand it, and to exchange it in conversation. His previous mapping exercises recording celestial bodies and their positions, and observing and measuring daily temperatures in an attempt to map weather patterns, have a certain passivity to them. Learning the Gadigal language was, by contrast, an active effort, both iterative and interactive. It requires not only an intellectual engagement but a bodily one. As Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed, the “eye analyzes, the ear tribalizes,” and Walter Ong extended this to suggest that “sight isolates, sound incorporates.”16 Tagaran incorporates Rooke into her world through the shared sounds of language. Or, as Edward Chamberlin describes it, oral traditions “require us to keep company the way written traditions did not.”17 Intuitively, Rooke, and Grenville, know that the more language he learns (not just terms) the greater his appreciation of the culture, its complexity and beauty. As he reflects, “You did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you” (233). From these interactions and under Tagaran’s tutelage, the two develop friendship, respect, and affection. Through his attempts to learn Gadigal, Rooke begins to understand himself better and to grasp the implications of the colonizer’s occupation of Abori16

Both are quoted in J. Edward Chamberlin, Living Language and Dead Reckoning: Navigating Oral and Written Traditions (2005 Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture; Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2006): 17. 17 Chamberlin, Living Language, 17. Chamberlin goes on to note that this comment should not be taken to imply that cultures are either oral or written. Indeed, as I noted earlier, Tagaran has a very different type of literacy and is certainly not (il)literate.

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ginal land. He slowly realizes that the two groups of people, like the two languages, cannot coexist. After one of the newcomers is speared, Rooke demands of Tagaran: “ ‘ Minyin guluara eora?’ […] ‘Why are the black men angry?’” She responds: “ ‘ Inyam ngalawi white men.’ ‘Because white men are settled here’” (252). Ordered to take part in a retaliatory party, the conflicted Rooke warns Tagaran and her people to flee. Although no-one is injured or taken by Rooke and the others, he realizes that, despite the warning he has given her, his position as a British officer has implicated him in the dispossession and violence that would likely follow. As he muses of his own complicity, If an action was wrong, it did not matter whether it succeeded or not, or how many clever steps you took to make sure it failed. If you were part of such an act, you were part of the wrong […]. If you were part of that machine, you were part of its evil. (280)

Recognizing that he has changed and that it has been his interaction with Tagaran and the Gadigal language that has changed him, Rooke felt he had “been replaced, syllable by syllable, by some other man” (280). It is, of course, no accident that he describes this change with a metaphor of language acquisition. Language has the power to transform and Rooke has been transformed into Kamara.

Appropriate: Appropriation In The Lieutenant, the manner in which Grenville has written Aboriginal characters represents a shift from her earlier approach. In an interview with A B C Radio National’s Ramona Koval, Grenville described her approach to writing Aboriginal characters in The Secret River.18 She noted that she did not want “to step into the heads of any of the Aboriginal characters.” She saw this as “a kind of appropriation” which she believed had happened too often in the past. She explained this by suggesting that, as a non-Aboriginal, she did not feel comfortable about attempting to get into the mind of an Aboriginal character. I think it can be argued that the way Grenville has developed and presented the character of Tagaran stays true to this ideal. Indeed, the reader never ‘hears’ Tagaran directly; only her words and her emotions as these are written on her face and observed by Rooke. True to the position she postu18

Ramona Koval, “Books and Writing,” A B C Radio National (17 July 2005), http: //www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm

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lated in The Secret River, Grenville has deliberately not got “into the head” of an Aboriginal character. The reader knows of Tagaran through Rooke’s reading of her and the only sense the audience has of her is what he imagines she might be thinking or feeling. Treading carefully with sensitivity and caution, Grenville has again avoided what she thinks might be a kind of appropriation. By drawing on Dawes’s notebooks of language and his observations about the Gadigal people, especially Patyegarang, Grenville is imaginatively using a European source. By this I mean that Dawes’s notebooks, Grenville’s historical source, are documents produced by a European for a European readership. And although the information in it and the knowledge represented there belong unquestionably to the Gadigal people, Dawes was gifted this material by people with whom he had intimate relationships and friendships. Its use by Grenville seems to me to be entirely appropriate. As Peter Carey wrote in his author’s note to Jack Maggs, the “author willingly admits to having once or twice stretched history to suit his own fictional ends.”19 Novelists borrow from history and, provided they are not racists or offensive in some other way, this is reasonable. For example, Thomas Keneally, in his novel Schindler’s Ark,20 explores the Holocaust, yet he is neither Jewish nor German and his connection to the narrative is via his research. His right to create the novel and get inside the minds of the Nazis and the Jews is relatively uncontentious. It is, after all, fiction. Perhaps the only reason Grenville was criticized (and, indeed, she herself was reticent) was because contemporary white Australians are the beneficiaries of Aboriginal dispossession. Could this be the legacy of colonial guilt and anxiety? Recently, it has been proposed that the relationship between Dawes and Patyegarang was an exploitative sexual one.21 In order to emphasize that she sees the relationship between the two as fraternal and not sexual, Grenville has Rooke compare Targaran to his beloved and muchmissed sister, Anne. Cassandra Pybus, however, suggests that historians like Inga Clendinnen have focused more on Dawes’s “tender conscience”22 than on what could be 19

Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (London: Faber & Faber, 1997): copyright page. Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982). 21 Cassandra Pybus, “ ‘ Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company’: A Transnational Perspective on the Saintly William Dawes,” History Australia 6.1 (April 2009): 12.1–12.7. 22 Clendinnen, quoted in Pybus, “ ‘ Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company’,” 12.2. 20

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seen as his darker side. She suggests that Grenville’s imaginary fictional portrait of Rooke can be traced back to these “admiring historical assessments of William Dawes.”23 Careful reading of Dawes’s diary, however, really does not support Pybus’s contention. Nevertheless, later in life, it is true that Dawes generated mixed feelings. For some, he was as a man of “dubious morality”24 who was (in Africa) “notorious up and down the coast as a debaucher of local African women, as well as the wives and daughters of the black settlers.”25 Yet, for others such as Zachary Macaulay, who was familiar with Dawes as the co-governor of the Sierra Leone Company in Africa, he was an honourable man. Writing in 1796, Macaulay described him as [an] excellent [man] of the earth. With great sweetness of disposition and self-command he possesses the most unbending principles. For upwards of three years have we acted together, and in that time many difficult cases arose for our decision; yet I am not sure that in the perplexities of consultation and the warmth of discussion, we either uttered an unkind word or cast an unkind look at one another.26

However, it is important to note again that Dawes is not Rooke and Patyegarang is not Tagaran. Dawes’s journal fragments merely provided the threads for Grenville’s woven narrative. The words and terms are those of Dawes but the story belongs to Grenville. The inspiration may have begun with the historical figures but the characters are fictional; their relationship and their interactions are imagined. Perhaps it is testament to Grenville’s writing that the vibrancy of Rooke and Tagaran is such that the narrative is sometimes mistaken for history rather than fiction. Grenville is, rather, drawing on her understandings of Aboriginal and settler relations to create her fictional characters. Nonetheless, her rendering of Rooke and Tagaran offers another way of thinking about the past, for not everything was ‘black and white’, ‘colonizer and colonized’ (teacher and pupil, adult and child) – sometimes there were interactions beyond these categories. Rooke and Tagaran stand on

23

Pybus, “ ‘ Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company’,” 12.2. “ ‘ Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company’,” 12.4. 25 “ ‘ Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company’,” 12.5. 26 Zachary Macaulay, quoted in A. Currer–Jones, William Dawes, R.M. 1762 to 1836. A sketch of his life, work, and explorations (1787) in the first expedition to New South Wales: also as Governor of Sierra Leone, and in Antigua, West Indies (Torquay: W.H. Smith & Son, 1930): 48. 24

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either side of the colonial frontier: he is invader of her country and dispossessor of her lands. He is also her friend, her Kamara. Through William Dawes’s notebooks, re-imagined and re-presented in the fiction of Kate Grenville, we get a glimpse of a colonial past where interactions across the cultural divide were more complex than many historical accounts have presented them as. WORKS CITED Birch, Tony. “Nothing has Changed: The Making and Unmaking of Koori Culture,” Meanjin 51.2 (1992): 229–42, 244–46. Bradley, James. “The History Question: Correspondence,” Quarterly Essay 24 (December 2006): 72–76. Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs (London: Faber & Faber, 1997). Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line” (1983), in Carter, Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings, ed. Jenny Uglow (1997; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998): 36–43. Chamberlin, J. Edward. Living Language and Dead Reckoning: Navigating Oral and Written Traditions (2005 Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture; Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2006). Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns The Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (October 2006): 2–72. Currer–Jones, A. William Dawes, R.M. 1762 to 1836. A Sketch of his Life, Work, and Explorations (1787) in the First Expedition to New South Wales: Also as Governor of Sierra Leone, and in Antigua, West Indies (Torquay: W.H. Smith & Son, 1930). Dening, Greg. “A Library Sailor: An interview with Greg Dening,” Limina 7 (2001): 1–9. Furphy, Sam. “Aboriginal House Names and Settler Australian Identity,” Journal of Australian Studies 72 (2002): 59–68. Grenville, Kate. The Lieutenant (Melbourne: Text, 2008). ——. Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006). Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s Ark (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982). Koval, Ramona. “Books and Writing with Ramona Koval,” A B C Radio National (17 July 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm Pybus, Cassandra. “ ‘ Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company’: A Transnational Perspective on the Saintly William Dawes,” History Australia 6.1 (April 2009). Available at Monash University Epress: 12.1–12.7.

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Bibliography

Overview 1 Works by Kate Grenville 1.1

Novels 1.1.1 Novel Extracts

1.2

Short Stories

1.2.1 Individual 1.2.2 Uncollected

1.3

Poetry

1.4.1 1.4.2 1.4.3 1.4.4 1.4.5

Non-Fiction / On Writing Miscellaneous: Author’s Statements, Essays, Newspaper Articles Interviews Biography / Personality Pieces / Notable News Items On Prizes, Awards and Distinctions

2 Criticism 2.1 2.1

Short Stories Bearded Ladies

2.1.1 Reviews 2.1.2 Articles and Essays

2.2–8 Individual Novels 2.2 Lilian’s Story 2.2.1 Reviews 2.2.2 Articles and Essays 2.2.3 4.2.3 On Jerzy Domaradzki’s 1995 film adaptation 2.3 Dreamhouse 2.3.1 Reviews

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2.3.2 Articles and Essays 2.4 Joan Makes History 2.4.1 Reviews 2.4.2 Articles and Essays 2.5 Dark Places 2.5.1 Reviews 2.5.2 Articles and Essays 2.6 The Idea of Perfection 2.6.1 Reviews 2.6.2 Articles and Essays 2.7 The Secret River 2.7.1 Reviews 2.7.2 Articles and Essays 2.8 The Lieutenant 2.8.1 Reviews

3.1–4 3.1

Non-Fiction/On Writing

The Writing Book 3.1.1 Reviews

3.2 Making Stories 3.2.1 Reviews 3.3 Writing From Start to Finish 3.3.1 Reviews 3.4 Searching for the Secret River 3.4.1 Reviews

4

General Articles and Essays on Grenville

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Bibliography

1 Works by Kate Grenville 1.1 Novels Lilian’s Story. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985, 1986. Rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1986. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991. San Diego C A : Harcourt Brace, 1994. London: Picador, 1994. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995. St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1996, 1997. Dreamhouse. St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1986. New York: Viking, 1987. St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2002, composite ed. with Bearded Ladies. Joan Makes History. St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1988. Latham M D & Albany N Y : British American, 1988. London: Heinemann, 1989. St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1993. New ed. St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2003. Dark Places. Sydney: Macmillan, 1994. London: Picador, 1994. Sydney: Picador, 1995. Alternative title: Albion’s Story, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. The Idea of Perfection. London: Picador, 1999. South Melbourne: Picador, 1999. New York: Viking, 2002. Sydney: Macmillan Picador, 2000. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text, 2005. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006. Melbourne: Text, 2006. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006. The Lieutenant. Melbourne: Text, 2008. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009.

1.1.1 Novel Extracts “A Colonial Tale,” Australian (4–5 October 1986), Literary Magazine: 10. “From: Lilian’s Story,” in Coast to Coast : Recent Australian Prose Writing, ed. Kerryn Goldsworthy (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1986): 118–23. “From: Dreamhouse,” Scripsi 4.2 (1986): 265–76. “Extract from Lilian’s Story,” in Imagining the Real: Australian Writing in the Nuclear Age, ed. Dorothy Green & David Headon (Sydney: A B C Enterprises, 1987): 117–21. “Albion Goes Hungry: From a Work-in-Progress,” Sydney Morning Herald (31 December 1988), Special Supplement: 3. “A Time of Hard,” Scripsi 4.3 (1987): 51–59. Repr. in Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers, ed. Gillian Whitlock (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1989): 24–35. “From: Father’s Book,” Scripsi 5.4 (August 1989): 189–95. “Brothers in Law (from a Work-in-Progress),” Overland 114 (May 1989): 3–5.

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“Federation Story (from Joan Makes History),” in Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers, ed. Gillian Whitlock (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1989): 3–13. “Albion Beside Himself (from a Work-in-Progress),” in Picador New Writing, ed. Helen Daniel & Robert Dessaix (Chippendale, N S W : Picador, 1993): 214–21. “A Family Man (from a Work-in-Progress Provisionally Entitled Perfidious Albion),” Scripsi 9.1 (1993): 119–24. “Karakarook,” Heat 11 (1999): 87–96. “Lilian’s Story [Extract],” in Mixed Grain: Celebrating 20 Years of ‘The Australian’ Vogel Literary Award (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2000): 39–41. “From Lilian’s Story,” in In the Gutter. . . Looking at the Stars: A Literary Adventure through Kings Cross, ed. Mandy Sayer & Louis Nowra (Milsons Point, N S W : Random House, 2000): 175–82. “Beware the Adorable,” Courier–Mail (4 January 2001): 18.

1.2 Short Stories 1.2.1 Collected Short Stories Bearded Ladies. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1984. Contains: “The Space Between,” “Making Tracks,” “The Test Is, If They Drown,” “Rosalie’s Folly,” “A Summer Aunt,” “Slow Dissolve,” “Meeting the Folks,” “Junction,” “Having a Wonderful Time,” “Refractions,” “No Such Thing as a Free Lunch,” “Country Pleasures,” “Blast Off” (poem). 1.2.2 Individual “The Space Between,” Southerly 40.3 (September 1980): 258–63. Repr. in Bearded Ladies (1984): 1–8. “Making Tracks,” in Bearded Ladies (1984): 9–23. “The Test Is, If They Drown,” Quadrant 25.5 (1981): 70–73. Repr. in Bearded Ladies (1984): 24–36, Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers, ed. Gillian Whitlock (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1989): 14–23, and Australian Women’s Stories: An Oxford Anthology, ed. Kerryn Goldsworthy (South Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1999): 262–72. “Rosalie’s Folly,” in Bearded Ladies (1984): 43–53. “A Summer Aunt,” in Bearded Ladies (1984): 54–66. Repr. in Splash (Ringwood, Victoria: Viking, 1998): 326–42.

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“Slow Dissolve,” in Bearded Ladies (1984): 67–74. Repr. in The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories, ed. Murray Bail (London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber, 1988): 401–406. “Meeting the Folks,” Southerly 40.2 (June 1980): 179–88. Repr. in Bearded Ladies (1984): 75–86. “Junction,” in Bearded Ladies (1984): 87–92. Repr. in Personal Best: Thirty Australian Authors Choose their Best Short Stories, ed. Garry Disher (Sydney: Imprint, 1989): 241–48. “Having a Wonderful Time,” Southerly 40.4 (December 1980): 389–97. Repr. in Bearded Ladies (1984): 93–103. “Refractions,” in A Ream of Writers: Australian Prize-Winning, Highly Commended and Outstanding Short Stories, ed. Susan Yorke (Sydney: Society of Women Writers, New South Wales Branch, 1982): 132–38. Repr. in Bearded Ladies (1984): 104–13. “No Such Thing as a Free Lunch,” in Bearded Ladies (1984): 114–18. Repr. in Goodbye to Romance: New Zealand and Australian Women Writers 1930– 1988, ed. Elizabeth Webby & Lydia Wevers (Wellington, New Zealand: Allen & Unwin, 1989): 287–90, and in The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories, ed. Michael Wilding (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1994): 310–12. “Country Pleasures,” in Bearded Ladies (1984): 119–64. 1.2.3 Uncollected “Dropping Dance,” Australian Literary Magazine (6–7 April 1985): 6–7. Repr. in The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, ed. Carmel Bird (Ringwood, Victoria: Viking, 2000): 311–17. “Great Moments in History,” This Australia 4.2 (1985): 61–64. “The Governor’s Lady,” Bulletin (1 April 1986): 71–72. “A Dinner Party,” Bulletin (28 March 1989): 92–94. “Look on My Works,” in Expressway: Invitation Stories by Australian Writers from a Painting by Jeffrey Smart, ed. Helen Daniel (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1989): 101–108. Repr. in Contemporary Classics: The Best Australian Short Fiction, ed. Don Anderson (Milsons Point, N S W : Vintage, 1996): 299– 310. “Motherhood: A Blessing, a Curse, and a Picture,” Sydney Review (January 1989): 15. Repr. in Adelaide Review 59 (January 1989): 19. “Water in Quantity,” in Books Death and Taxes, ed. D.J. O’Hearn (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1995): 82–86. “The Fourth One,” in The Best Australian Stories 1999, ed. Peter Craven (Melbourne: Bookman, 1999): 8–18.

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“Mate,” Granta 70 (“Australia: The New New World,” Summer 2000): 293– 304. Repr. in The Best Australian Stories 2001, ed. Peter Craven (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2001): 135–45. “The Bushfire,” Bulletin (19 December–2 January 2001): 100–101. Repr. in The Best Australian Stories 2001, ed. Peter Craven (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2001): 128–34, and in Harvard Review 30 (2006): 60–63.

1.3 Poetry “Blast Off,” in Bearded Ladies (1984): 37–42.

1.4 Non-Fiction 1.4.1 On Writing The Writing Book (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990, 1998). With Sue Woolfe. Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written (St. Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993). Writing from Start to Finish: A Six-Step Guide (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002). Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2006). 1.4.2 Miscellaneous: Author’s Statements,

Essays, Newspaper Articles “Best Books of ’84,” Sydney Morning Herald (8 December 1984), Saturday Review: 1. Lists of ten authors’ favourite books of the year. “Self-Portrait,” Australian Book Review 87 (December–January 1987): 17–18. “Why I Write as I Do: The World Is Round Like an Orange,” Australian (6–7 June 1987), Literary Quarterly: 6. “Schooldays: Kate Grenville,” The Age (16 July 1988), Saturday Extra: 1. “Kate Grenville,” in An Eloquent Sufficiency: 50 Writers Talk About Life and Literature, ed. Susan Wyndham (Sydney: Sydney Morning Herald Books, 1988): 116–20. “From The Getting of Wisdom to Illywhacker: The Library and Our Literary Heritage,” in Living Together: People, Persuasion, Power: Proceedings of the 25th L A A Conference (Sydney: Library Association of Australia, 1988): 562–81. Repr. in Australian Library Journal (February 1989): 55–69. “Sue Woolfe: Painted Woman,” in Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, ed. Kate Grenville & Sue Woolfe (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993): 254–64.

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& Sue Woolfe. The following interviews in Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, ed. Kate Grenville & Sue Woolfe (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993). — “Jessica Anderson: The Commandant,” 1–14. — “Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda,” 33–58. — “Helen Garner: The Children’s Bach,” 61–72. — “David Ireland: A Woman of the Future,” 126–35. — “Elizabeth Jolley: Mr Scobie’s Riddle,” 156–67. — “Thomas Keneally: The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” 186–95. — “Patrick White: Memoirs of Many in One,” 234–35. “Why I Write,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994): 140–42. “Albion the Husband,” in Weddings and Wives, ed. Dale Spender (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1994): 349–58. “Writing in the ’90s: The Writer as Reader,” Australian Author 28.1 (1996): 14– 16. “The Sole’s Eternal Search,” The Age (28 March 1998), News Extra: 11. “The Novelist as Barbarian,” from “Challenging Australian History: Discovering New Narratives,” The National Library of Australia Conference (14–15 April 2000), http://www.nla.gov.au/events/history/papers/Kate_Grenville%20.html (accessed 22 October 2010). “My Bedside Table: Kate Grenville,” The Age (13 August 2005), Review: 6. “Comment,” The Monthly 6 (October 2005): 16–18. “Live Their Life,” Courier–Mail (2 July 2005), BAM: 8. “The Forum: Kate Grenville: On the Historian Within,” Weekend Australian (13– 14 August 2005), Review: 2. “First Voice,” The Age (13 December 2005), A2: 29. “The Writing of The Secret River,” Arts 27 (2005): 74–86. “Unsettling the Settler: History, Culture, Race, and the Australian Self,” in The Geography of Meanings: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Place, Space, Land, and Dislocation, ed. Savio Hooke, Maria Teresa & Salman Akhtar (London: International Psychoanalytical Association, 2007): 49–61. Paper presented at the Open Day of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, 2006. “Cries and Misdemeanors,” Bulletin (20 December 2005–10 January 2006): 74– 76. “First Person: Kate Grenville,” Guardian (18 February 2006): 3. “Between Two Men,” The Age (14 January 2006), Saturday Extra: 12–13. “History: Down and Out,” Guardian (24 June 2006): 8. “Unlocking Secrets of Old,” Canberra Times (26 August 2006), Panorama: 6–7.

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“Living the Past,” in Confessions & Memoirs: Best Stories Under the Sun, ed. Michael Wilding & David Myers (Rockhampton: Central Queensland U P , 2006): 17–20. “Secret River – Secret History,” Sydney Papers 18.1 (2006): 148–53. “What the Writers Read,” Weekend Australian (9–10 December 2006), Review: 4–6, 8 (esp. 4). “Past, Present and Future of the Short Story in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific: Panel Discussion,” in Theory and Practice of the Short Story: Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, ed. Angelo Righetti (Verona: Università di Verona, Dipartimento di Anglistica, 2006): 265–83 (esp. 265, 272– 73, 278, 280). “Saying the Unsayable,” First Thea Astley Memorial Lecture, in Making Waves: 10 Years of the Byron Bay Writers Festival, ed. Marele Day, Susan Bradley Smith & Fay Knight (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2006): 1–9. Repr. in Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds, ed. Susan Sheridan & Paul Genoni (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006): 176–81. “The Books That Changed Me: Kate Grenville,” Sun–Herald (1 July 2007): 53. “My Bookshelf: Kate Grenville: Author,” (Sydney) Magazine 58 (February 2008): 18. “How to Occupy the Mind of a Monster,” Weekend Australian (26–27 April 2008), Review: 8–9. “Writers in a Time of Change,” intro. Louise Adler, The Monthly (May 2009), Slow T V , http://www.themonthly.com.au/kate-grenville-writers-time-change1885 (accessed 1 October 2010). Keynote address at the Festival of Ideas, University of Melbourne. Streaming video, 29m 16s and 26m 9s. Print version as “The Writer in a Time of Change: Learning from Experience,” Griffith Review: A Quarterly of Writing & Ideas 26 (Summer 2009): 53–64. “The Weight of the Word,” The Age (20 June 2009), A2: 16. “Kate Grenville: The Books That Changed Me,” Sun–Herald (30 August 2009), Extra: 10–11. “Books,” Vogue Australia 54.9 (September 2009): 190. “What I’ve Learnt: Kate Grenville, Author, 59,” Weekend Australian (7–8 November 2009), Magazine: 6–7. “A True Apology to Aboriginal People Means Action as Well,” Guardian (14 February 2010): 32. “Newsreel Essay: Indigenous Literacy Project,” Meanjin 69.1 (Autumn 2010): 10–12.

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1.4.3 Interviews “Kate Grenville: A Conversation” (Sydney: Maxwell’s Video Collection, 1988; University of Sydney, 44 min.). “Spotlight on Kate Grenville,” Melbourne Writers Festival, Federation Square, Melbourne (23 August 2009). “Kate Grenville in Conversation,” Sydney Writers’ Festival, Sydney Theatre (24 May 2009), http://www.swf.org.au/podcasts-2009/#grenville (accessed 22 October 2010). Ball, Maggie. “Interview with Kate Grenville: 27 February 2001,” http://www .suite101.com/mybulletin.cfm/authors/5643 (link inactive 13 November 2010). Bennett, Bruce. “Kate Grenville,” in Theory and Practice of the Short Story: Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, ed. Angelo Righetti (Verona: Università di Verona, Dipartimento di Anglistica, 2006): 23–38. Bird, Carmel. “The Words to Do It,” Australian Book Review 149 (April 1993): 10–11. Interview with Kate Grenville and Sue Woolfe about Making Stories. Brass, Kenneth. “Kate’s Story: The Tomboy Who Vanquished Confusion,” Weekend Australian (13–14 September 1984): 16. Craven, Peter. “Albion’s Story,” The Age (23 July 1994), Saturday Extra: 7. Doogue, Geraldine. “Kate Grenville and Manyallaluk,” A B C Saturday Extra (13 March 2010), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/saturdayextra/stories/2010/2844210 .htm (accessed 1 October 2010). Transcript of radio interview. Errington, Susan. “The Interview: Kate Grenville,” Wet Ink 12 (Spring 2008): 37–39. Koval, Ramona. “Books and Writing with Ramona Koval,” A B C Radio National (17 July 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm (accessed 22 October 2010). ——. “Between Cultures,” Biblio 14.11–12 (November–December 2009): 34–36. Kate Grenville in conversation with Ramona Koval, mainly on The Lieutenant. Mansfield, Susan. “Tales of a New-Found Land,” Scotsman (21 February 2009): 14, http://living.scotsman.com/booksAuthor-Interview-Kate-Grenville.4996736.jp (accessed 23 March 2010). Author Interview with Kate Grenville, mainly on The Lieutenant. Oder, Norman. Interview with Norman Oder, Publishers Weekly (31 October 1994), http://www .users.bigpond.com/kgrenville/Interviews/Interviews.htm (accessed 27 January 2008). Robertson, Robin. “Writers Talking,” Book Magazine 1.2 (August–September 1987): 37–38. Rogers, Shelagh. “You Don’t Really Know What It Is until You Go Away and Come Back: Interviews with Four Australian Writers,” Australian and New

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Zealand Studies in Canada 1 (1989): 33–43 (esp. 38–41). (Interviews with David Malouf, Helen Garner, Grenville and Frank Moorhouse.) Rubbo, Mark. “Kate Grenville Interviewed by Mark Rubbo,” Readings: Melbourne (2 October 2008), http://www.readings.com.au/interview/kate-grenville1 (accessed 13 November 2010). Sorensen, Rosemary. “Kate Grenville: Shine a Light,” Australian Book Review 162 (July 1994): 10–11. Turcotte, Gerry. “Daughters of Albion,” in Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers, ed. Gillian Whitlock (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1989): 36–48. ——. “The Story-Teller’s Revenge: Kate Grenville Interviewed by Gerry Turcotte,” Kunapipi 16.1 (1994): 147–58. ——. “Telling Those Untold Stories: An Interview with Kate Grenville,” Southerly 47.3 (September 1987): 284–99. Waldren, Murray. “The Imperfect Perfectionist,” Weekend Australian (8 September 2001), Magazine: 28. Willbanks, Ray. “Kate Grenville: Interview,” Speaking Volumes: Australian Writers and Their Work (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1992): 97–110. Weisz, Michelle, & Anna Bang. “Interview with Kate Grenville on Dark Places,” Southerly 59.3–4 (Spring–Summer 1999): 180–84. Woolfe, Sue. “Kate Grenville: Lilian’s Story,” in Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, ed. Kate Grenville & Sue Woolfe (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993): 94–123. 1.4.4 Biography/Personality Pieces/Notable News Items Ackland, Michael. “Kate Grenville,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 325: Australian Writers, 1975–2000, ed. Selina Samuels (Detroit M I : Gale Research, 2006): 128–34. Adamson, Judy. “Coping with Creativity and Children’s Shoes,” Sydney Morning Herald (4 October 1995), Northern Herald: 5. Armitage, Catherine. “Letting Loose the Monster,” Sydney Morning Herald (25 June 1994), Spectrum: 9. ——. “Lighting up Those Dark but Not Spooky Places,” Sydney Morning Herald (18 July 1994): 6. Blakeney, Sally. “A Writer’s Life: Ideas and Perfection,” Bulletin (12 July 2005): 86–88. Clancy, Laurie. “Kate Grenville (1950–),” A Reader’s Guide to Australian Fiction, ed. Laurie Clancy (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1992): 360–61.

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Conde, Sara. “Datelines: Kate Grenville,” Sydney Morning Herald (27 June 1997), Spectrum: 2. Demasi, Laura. “My Other Life,” Sun–Herald (18 September 2005), Sunday Life: 13. Grenville, Kate. “Secret River – Secret History,” Sydney Papers 18.1 (Summer 2006): 148–53. ——. “The Sole’s Eternal Search,” The Age (28 March 1998), News Extra: 11. ——. “My Favourite Book,” The Sunday Age (11 June 1994), Agenda: 10. ——. “Law of the Jungle at Balmoral,” Sydney Morning Herald (28 December 1988): 12. ——. “Kids’ Books are for Grannies,” Sydney Morning Herald (14 August 1987), Saturday Review: 48. McDonald–Leigh, Sharon. “Career Path: Kate Grenville,” Sydney Morning Herald (22 April 2000), Employment: 1. Rustin, Susanna. “A Life in Writing: Past imperfect,” Guardian Review (18 August 2007), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/aug/18/featuresreviews .guardianreview12 (accessed 28 October 2010). Schmidt, Lucinda. “Profile: Kate Grenville,” Sydney Morning Herald (21 June 2006), Money: 2. Stephens, Tony. “The Write Way,” The Age (13 March 1993), Good Weekend: 18–20, 23. Wyndham, Susan. “Rhyme Without Reason,” Weekend Australian (12–13 November 1994), Review: 7. ——. “A Woman With a Past,” Sydney Morning Herald (9 July 2005), Spectrum: 20–21. Stanley, Warwick. “Acclaimed Author Backs for Aboriginal War Memorial,” National Indigenous Times (5 March 2009): 4. 1.4.5 On Prizes, Awards, Distinctions Anon. “Commonwealth Prize for Grenville,” Bookseller & Publisher Magazine 85.8 (March 2006): 7. Anon. “Grenville Takes Commonwealth,” Bookseller 5221 (17 March 2006): 7. Anon. “Grenville and Hyland on Booker List,” Bookseller & Publisher Magazine 86.4 (October 2006): 4. Anon. “Grenville Wins C W P Best Book,” Bookseller & Publisher Magazine 85.9 (April 2006): 14. Anon. “Grenville Wins Fiction Prize,” Canberra Times (7 June 2001): 7. Atkinson, Frances. “Australians Shortlisted for Booker, But Carey Out of the Running,” The Age (16 September 2006): 3.

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Baldwin, Suzy. “Men and Women: Oranges and Lemons,” Sydney Morning Herald (29 June 2001), Metropolitan: 16. Bennie, Angela. “A Thrill for This Writer, But Not Everyone’s Idea of Perfection,” Sydney Morning Herald (12–13 May 2001): 3. Bunbury, Stephanie. “Doing It by the Booker,” The Age (7 October 2006), A2: 26–27. Button, James. “Grenville’s River Runs through the Palace,” Sydney Morning Herald (17 May 2006): 9. ——, & Giulia Sirignani. “Win or Not, Women Write Themselves into Literary History,” The Age (10 October 2006): 5. Byrne, Madeleine. “Brindabella: Literary News From Around Australia,” Antipodes 20.1 (June 2006): 92–93 (esp. 92). Carbines, Louise. “Delighted Grenville Takes Top Prize for Fiction,” The Age (21 October 1995), A5: 1–2. Condon, Matt. “A Great Idea,” Sun–Herald (29 July 2001), Sunday Life: 30. Farmer, Beverley. “Three Novels: One Judge’s View,” Australian Book Review 96 (November 1987): 6–8 (esp. 7). Review of Rod Jones, Julia Paradise, Grenville, Dreamhouse, Janine Burke, Second Sight. Grenville, Kate. “Refractions,” in A Ream of Writers: Australian Prize-Winning, Highly Commended and Outstanding Short Stories, ed. Susan Yorke (Sydney: Society of Women Writers, New South Wales Branch, 1982): 132–38. Jameson, Julietta. “When Losing is Really Winning,” Sun–Herald (15 October 2006): 15. McCulloch, Susan. “Prize Society,” Weekend Australian (8–9 June 1996), Review: 6. Metherell, Gia. “Tiny Text in Booker List Double,” Canberra Times (16 September 2006): 1. ——. “Turning the Page on Disappointment,” Canberra Times (16 September 2006): 4. Price, Jenna. “Kate Grenville Hits Back with Perfection,” Canberra Sunday Times (24 June 2001): 59. Smith, Michael. “Text Authors Double-Booked,” The Age (30 September 2006), Insight: 7. Sorensen, Rosemary. “My View,” Courier–Mail (9 June 2001), BAM: 2. Steger, Jason. “Prize Aspirants Are Sell Mates,” The Age (7 October 2006), A2: 29. ——. “Riding the Booker Waves,” The Age (28 October 2006) A2: 29. ——. “Shelf Life: A Winning Week for Frank and Kate,” The Age (9 June 2001), Saturday Extra: 9.

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——. “Shelf Life,” The Age (30 June 2001), Saturday Extra: 7. Verghis, Sharon. “World’s Idea of Perfection that got the Local Snub,” Sydney Morning Herald (7 June 2001): 5. Waldren, Murray, “Award ‘Vindicates’ Writer’s Obsession,” Australian (15 March 2006): 3. ——. “Who’s on First, Art’s on Second,” Weekend Australian (7–8 October 2006), Inquirer: 19. Wyndham, Susan. “International Award for Grenville’s Very Australian Story,” Sydney Morning Herald (16 March 2006): 13. ——. “Miles Franklin Finalists Make History by Telling it How it Was,” Sydney Morning Herald (28 April 2006): 5. ——. “River of Champers for Grenville Opus,” Sydney Morning Herald (16–17 September 2006): 7.

2 2.1 2.1 2.1.1

Criticism

Short Stories Bearded Ladies Reviews

Ahearne, Kate. “Tradition, Talent and Gossamer Vision,” The Age (11 August 1984), Saturday Extra: 15. Dunn, Rosalind. “Literary Ladies With Several Good Words,” Daily Sun (Melbourne; 10 May 1986). Review of Grenville, Bearded Ladies; Thea Astley, The Acolyte; Marian Eldridge, Walking the Dog; Elizabeth Jolley, Palomino. Dutton, Geoffrey. “Men Take a Couple of Beatings,” Bulletin (25 September 1984): 98, 100. Eldridge, Marian. “Special Women: And Superb Storytelling,” Australian Book Review 76 (November 1985): 25–28. Review of Bearded Ladies and Lilian’s Story. Forshaw, Thelma. “The Sullen Novelists: New Australian Fiction,” Quadrant 29.3 (March 1985): 77–79. Group review, incl. inter alii Tim Winton, Shallows; Elizabeth Jolley, Milk and Honey; Grenville, Bearded Ladies; Alan Gould, The Man Who Stayed Below; Jill Neville, Last Ferry to Manly. Frost, Lucy. “The Grotesque and the Innocent,” Overland 97 (1984): 66–68. Review of Elizabeth Jolley, Palomino and Milk and Honey; Grenville, Bearded Ladies; John Hooker, The Bush Soldiers. Gerrish, Carolyn. “Bearded Ladies,” Womanspeak 9.1 (November–December 1984): 24.

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Haynes, Roslynn D. “Bearded Ladies,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 89. Hulse, Michael. “Kate Grenville, Bearded Ladies,” P N Review 13.5 (1987): 80– 81 (esp. 81). Review of C.J. Koch, The Doubleman; Blanche d’Alpuget, Winter in Jerusalem; Jack Lindsay, The Blood Vote; and Grenville, Bearded Ladies. Meyer, Charlotte M. “Comic and Cruel,” American Book Review 10.6 (January– February 1989): 11–12. Review of Bearded Ladies, Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse. Motion, Joanna. “Patterning the Stuff of Life,” Times Literary Supplement (18 October 1985): 1173. Group review (Grenville, Elizabeth Jolley, Barbara Hanrahan, Olga Masters). Noonan, William. “Bearded Ladies,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 89. ——. “Women of Few Words,” Weekend Australian (15–16 September 1984), Magazine: 15. Peake, Catherine. “Wit Bold, Motherhood Diabolic,” Sydney Morning Herald (29 September 1984), Weekend Magazine: 47. Review of Grenville, Bearded Ladies; Leone Sperling, Mother’s Day. Tonkin, Maggie. “Bearded Ladies / Dreamhouse,” Network Review of Books 15 (May 2003), http://api-network/main/index.php?apply=reviews&webpage=api _reviews&flexedit=&flex_password=&menu_label=&menuID=homely&men ubox=&Review=4747 (accessed 22 October 2010). Treloar, Carol. “A Dark Parable – Mother’s Day,” Advertiser (1 December 1984), Magazine: 11. 2.1.2

Articles and Essays

Pes, Annalisa. “Coping with a Man’s World: Women in Henry Handel Richardson and Kate Grenville’s Short Stories,” in Theory and Practice of the Short Story: Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, ed. Angelo Righetti (Verona: Università di Verona, Dipartimento di Anglistica, 2006): 129–41 (esp. 134– 40).

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2.2–8 2.2 2.2.1

225

Individual Novels Lilian’s Story Reviews

Anderson, Don. “Fine Treatment of a Sydney Legend,” National Times (28 June– 4 July 1985): 32. Brewster, Anne. “Women’s Story,” C R N L E Reviews Journal 2 (1985): 27–31. Bucknell, Katherine. “Attention-Seekers Tale,” Times Literary Supplement (10 October 1986): 1130. Carper, Leslie. “Sins of the Fathers,” Women’s Review of Books 4.10–11 (July– August 1987): 34. Clancy, Laurie. “Eccentric in Full Bloom,” The Age (17 August 1985), Saturday Extra: 13. Craven, Peter. “Second Thoughts,” The Sunday Age (2 February 1997), Agenda: 6. Eldridge, Marian. “Special Women: And Superb Storytelling,” Australian Book Review 76 (November 1985): 25–28. Review of Bearded Ladies and Lilian’s Story. Emery, Jane. “Lilian Is Worthy… ,” Antipodes 3.1 (Spring 1989): 50–51. England, Katherine. “Larger-Than-Life Lil Leaves Us Exultant,” Advertiser (17 August 1985), Saturday Review: 7. ——. “Lilian’s Story,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 90. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. “Female, Fat and Brilliant: A Woman’s Story Through a Woman’s Eyes,” The Age Monthly Review 5.5 (September 1985): 17–19. Halligan, Marion. “Grenville’s Lilian, Life as Legend,” Canberra Times (19 October 1985): B2. Jefferis, Barbara. “Three Novels,” Overland 103 (July 1986): 65–66. Review of Elizabeth Jolley, Foxybaby; Grenville, Lilian’s Story; Olga Masters, A Long Time Dying. Jolley, Elizabeth. “Books for Christmas,” Sydney Morning Herald (7 December 1985), Saturday Review: 41. Lilian’s Story; Angela Carter, Nights at the Ghetto; David Malouf, Antipodes. ——. “Lil’s Story: Facts, Fat, Frailness,” Sydney Morning Herald (29 June 1985), Books Review: 42. Repr. As “Facts, Fat and Frailness: Review of Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story,” in Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers, ed. Gillian Whitlock (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1989): 331–33. Lewis, Julie. [Untitled], Fremantle Arts Review 1.2 (February 1986): 14.

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Lucas, Robin. “New Paperbacks,” Sydney Morning Herald (12 April 1991), Spectrum: 43. McGregor, Adrian. “Woman Against the Odds,” Courier–Mail (24 August 1985), Great Weekend: 30. McKernan, Susan. “Absurdity, the Hidden Part of Normalcy,” Bulletin (23 July 1985): 78, 80. Meyer, Charlotte M. “Comic and Cruel,” American Book Review 10.6 (January– February 1989): 11–12. Review of Bearded Ladies, Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse. Mitchell, Adrian. “Fat Lil Shakes and Shocks,” Weekend Australian (22–23 June 1985), Magazine: 15. Nelson, Penelope. “Paperbacks,” Weekend Australian (30–31 March 1991), Review: 6. Nonkin, Lesley Jane. “The Strangest of Beings,” Belles-Lettres (U S A ) 2.1 (September 1986): 9. Purdy, James. “Lunacy Among the Teacups,” New York Times Book Review (7 September 1986): 27. Redner, Jill. “Lilian’s Story,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 90. Turcotte, Gerry. “Lilian’s Story,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 90. 2.2.2

Articles and Essays

Barcan, Ruth. “ ‘ Mobility is the Key’: Bodies, Boundaries and Movement in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 29.2 (April 1998): 31–55. Rev. & repr. in Lighting Dark Places, ed. Kossew, 93–117. Bartlett, Alison. “Other Stories: The Representation of History in Recent Fiction by Australian Women Writers,” Southerly 53.1 (March 1993): 165–80. Discussion of Jean Bedford, Sister Kate: A Novel; Grenville, Lilian’s Story; Janine Burke, Second Sight. Bird, Delys. “Bodily Desires and Narrative Pleasures: Food and Feminism in Two Contemporary Australian Novels,” Antipodes 12.2 (December 1998): 95–99. Comparison with Amanda Lohrey, Camille’s Bread. Brady, Veronica. “The Men Who Loved Children,” in Incest and the Community: Australian Perspectives, ed. Penelope Hetherington (Perth: Centre for Western Australian History, Department of History, U of Western Australia, 1991): 79– 94. Repr. in Caught in the Draught: On Contemporary Australian Culture and

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Society, ed. Veronica Brady (Pymble, N S W : Angus & Robertson, 1994): 67– 91. Deane, Laura. “Psychotic Fictions and Terrible Truths: Reading Madness, Femininity and Excessive Speech,” Antithesis 15 (March 2005): 74–90. Dolphin, Joan L. “In Praise of Shakespeare: Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story,” in Relocating Praise: Literary Modalities and Rhetorical Contexts, ed. Alice G. Den Otter (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2000): 51–62. Gleeson–White, Jane. “Lilian’s Story: Kate Grenville,” in Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works (Crows Nest, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2007): 312–15. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. “Feminist Writings, Feminist Readings: Recent Australian Writing by Women,” Meanjin 44.4 (December 1985): 506–15. Comparison with Beverley Farmer, Helen Garner, Jean Bedford, Barbara Hanrahan, Janine Burke, Christina Stead, Kylie Tennant, Blanche d’Alpuget. Holden, Robert. “My Life as a Book,” in Crackpots, Ratbags and Rebels: A Swag of Aussie Eccentrics, ed. Robert Holden (Sydney: A B C Books for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2005): 195–209 (esp. 207–209). Holm, Antoinette. “ ‘ A Lady Glides’: Lilian’s Story and the Classed Body,” in “Throwing Some Weight Around: Women and Fatness in the Contemporary, Post-Colonial Societies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand” (doctoral dissertation, University of Wollongong, 1998): 132–66. Jones, Dorothy. “Edgy Laughter: Women and Australian Humour,” Australian Literary Studies 16.2 (October 1993): 161–67 (esp. 165). ——. “Living in the Country: A Woman’s Reading,” Australian–Canadian Studies 10.2 (Spring 1992): 87–98. Keane, Colleen. “The Construction of Femininity and Female Sexuality in Contemporary Australian Fiction: A Reading of Four Novels” (MA thesis, La Trobe University, 1990). Discussion of Marion Campbell, Not Being Miriam; Grenville, Lilian’s Story; Mark Henshaw, Out of the Line of Fire; David Ireland, Woman of the Future. Kwast–Greff, Chantal. “The Body and the Text: Extra and Infra Textual Scars,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 25.1 (2002): 15–25. ——. “Fat vs. Fate: Or, Why a ‘Woman of Destiny’ Needs to Be Fat,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 22.2 (2000): 47–52. ——. “Le Corps Écrit-Inscrit: Anorexie, Automutilation et Folie dans la Littérature Australienne,” Correspondances Océaniennes 6.1 (2007): 17–20. Midalia, Susan. “Art for Woman’s Sake: Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story as Female Bildungsroman,” in Constructing Gender: Feminism in Literary Stud-

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ies, ed. Hilary Fraser & R.S. White (Nedlands, W A : U of Western Australia P, 1994): 253–68. ——. “The Contemporary Female Bildungsroman: Gender, Genre and the Politics of Optimism,” Westerly 41.1 (Autumn 1996): 89–104. Prentice, Chris. “The Interplay of Place and Placelessnes in the Subject of PostColonial Fiction,” S P A N : Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 31 (February 1991): 63–80. Discussion of Grenville, Lilian’s Story and Sally Morgan, My Place. Ralph, John. “Pre-Text and Rough Drafts: The Composition Process and the Evolution of Meaning in Robert Drewe’s The Bodysurfers and Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story” (doctoral dissertation, University of Western Australia, 2004). Salzman, Paul. “Talking / Listening: Anecdotal Style in Recent Australian Women’s Fiction,” Southerly 49.4 (December 1989): 539–53. Mainly on Elizabeth Jolley, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance and Helen Garner, Monkey Grip. Thomas, Kylie. “White Bodies and Colonial History: Sexual Violence in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 1999). Thompson, Veronica. “You Are What You Eat: Women, Eating and Identity in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Scent of Eucalyptus,’ A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 27.4 (October 1996): 129–37. Thomson, Helen. “Madness as a Postcolonial Strategy of National Identity in Peter Carey’s Illywhacker and Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Dark Places,” in Australian Nationalism Reconsidered: Maintaining a Monocultural Tradition in a Multicultural Society, ed. Adi Wimmer (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1999): 172–80. Walker, Brenda. “ ‘ Sweetest and Best in Womanhood’? Equivocal Representations of Maternity in Australian Women’s Fiction,” Westerly 34.4 (December 1989): 69–75. Comparison with Barbara Hanrahan. Woolfe, Sue. “Kate Grenville: Lilian’s Story,” in Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, ed. Kate Grenville & Sue Woolfe (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1993): 94–123. 2.2.3

On Jerzy Domaradzki’s 1995 film adaptation

Berardinelli, James. “Lilian’s Story: A Film Review by James Berardinelli,” reelviews (1997), http://www.reelviews.net/movies/l/lilians.html (accessed 22 October 2010).



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229

Connolly, Keith. “Lilian Reveals Echoes of Lodz,” The Sunday Age (12 May 1996), Agenda: 7. Cracknell, Ruth. Interview with Richard Glover. A B C Radio 2BL (30 April 1996). Creed, Barbara. “A Journey of Self-Discovery,” The Age (10 May 1996), Saturday Extra: 11. Crompton, Helen. “Her Own Worst Critic,” West Australian (15 May 1996), Today: 3. Domaradzki, Jerzy, dir. Lilian’s Story, screenplay by Steve Wright, starring Toni Collette, Ruth Cracknell and Barry Otto (Movieco Australia, A U S 1996; 94 min.). Galvin, Peter. “Psychology Sinks in Grim Shadows of Sydney Gothic,” Sydney Morning Herald (9 May 1996): 16. Gillard, Garry. “Chapter 4: Social Problem,” in Gillard, Ten Types of Australian Film (15 February 2009), http://www.garrygillard.net/writing/tentypes/social problem.html#_ftnref7 (accessed 1 October 2010). Brief mention. ——, & Lois Achimovich. “The Representation of Madness in Some Australian Films,” Journal of Critical Psychology Counselling and Psychotherapy 3.1 (Spring 2003): 9–19. Brief mention. Healy, Alice. “ ‘ Impossible Speech’ and the Burden of Translation: Lilian’s Story from Page to Screen,” J A S A L 5 (2006): 162–77. Rev. & repr. in Lighting Dark Places, ed. Kossew, 135–51. Lamont, Leonie. “Film Brings Back Memories of Sydney Eccentric,” Sydney Morning Herald (12 May 1995): 3. Malone, Peter. “Lilian’s Story,” Cinema Papers 110 (June 1996): 57. Naglazas, Mark. “Poles Alike in Fine Film Treatments,” West Australian (1 May 1996), Today: 5. Roach, Vicky. “To Bea or Not to Bea – An Uneasy Blend,” Daily Telegraph (Sydney; 9 May 1996), 7 Days: 39. Rosen, Alan, Garry Walter, Tom Politis & Michael Shortland. “From Shunned to Shining: Doctors, Madness and Psychiatry in Australian and New Zealand Cinema,” Medical Journal of Australia 167.11–12 (1–5 December 1997): 640– 44 (esp. 41). Brief mention. Schembri, Jim. “Origins and Influences,” The Age (6 May 1996): 17. Smith, Margaret. “Bee and Bill: A Sydney Story,” Sydney Morning Herald (19 April 1996), Spectrum: 16. Thornton, Mark. “Lilian’s Story Part of New Wave,” Canberra Times (19 June 1994): 22.

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LIGHTING DARK PLACES

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Dreamhouse Reviews

Anderson, Don. “Grenville’s Dark Star Reflects Evil,” National Times on Sunday (21 September 1986): 33. Ahearne, Kate. “Faint Praise,” Overland 106 (March 1987): 76–78. Cotter, Jane. “Romance Goes Down the Plughole: A Black Comedy of Manners, Mice and Men,” Australian Book Review 85 (October 1986): 5–7. Edwards, Brian. “Nightmare and Possibility in the Dreamhouse,” Mattoid 27.1 (1987): 82–84. England, Katharine. “Characters Lost in the Dreamhouse,” Advertiser (September 1986), Magazine: 21. Jefferis, Barbara. “Dreamhouse,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 91. ——. “Turmoil in Tuscany,” Weekend Australian (6–7 September 1986), Magazine: 14. Luke, Margot. “Dreamhouse,” Fremantle Arts Review 2.2 (February 1987): 12. McKernan, Susan. “Playing the Contemporary Gothic Game,” Bulletin (30 September 1986): 92, 95. Meyer, Charlotte M. “Comic and Cruel,” American Book Review 10.6 (January– February 1989): 11–12. Review of Bearded Ladies, Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse. Nayman, Michele. “Everyday Weirdness,” National Times (21 September 1986): 33. Patterson, Carol. “Black Dream Prevails as Bizarre Sex Has Its Way,” Mercury (1 November 1986), Weekend Review: 21. Peacock, Molly. “Pairing off in Tuscany,” New York Times Book Review (22 November 1987): 24. Pierce, Peter. “Extravagant Dream Verging on Excess,” The Age (13 September 1986), Saturday Extra: 10. Reeder, Stephanie Owen. “Dreamhouse,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 91. Saunders, Kay. “A Dream, or a Nightmare?” Courier–Mail (27 September 1986), Great Weekend: 6. Sen, Veronica. “Escaping from the House of Dreams,” Canberra Times (13 September 1986): B2. ——. “Youth’s Hopes and Fears in its Own World,” Canberra Sunday Times (24 May 1987): 9.



Bibliography

231

Stone, Robyn. “Dark Possibilities in a Poe-Like World,” Sydney Morning Herald (6 September 1986), Books Review: 48. Taylor, Linda. “Orstralia and Elsewhere,” Times Literary Supplement (15–21 April 1988): 421. Review of Elizabeth Jolley, The Newspaper of Claremont Street; Susan Webster, Small Tales of a Town; Georgia Savage, The Estuary; Barbara Hanrahan, A Chelsea Girl; Grenville, Dreamhouse. Thompson, Christina. “Sempre Sinistra: Kate Grenville’s Split-Level Dreamhouse,” Scripsi 4.3 (1987): 61–68. ——. “Dreamhouse,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 91. Tonkin, Maggie. “Bearded Ladies / Dreamhouse,” Network Review of Books 15 (May 2003), http://api-network/main/index.php?apply=reviews&webpage=api _reviews&flexedit=&flex_password=&menu_label=&menuID=homely&men ubox=&Review=4747 (accessed 2 October 2010). Waterman, Judy. “A Blighted Bloom,” C R N L E Reviews Journal 2 (1987–88): 23–25. 2.3.2

Articles and Essays

Bennett, Bruce: “More Than a Love Affair: Australian Writers and Italy,” in Australians in Italy: Contemporary Lives and Impressions, ed. Bill Kent, Ros Pesman & Cynthia Troup (Melbourne: Monash University ePress, 2008): 08.1– 08.11 (esp. 08.5); http://publications.epress.monash.edu/doi/pdf/10.2104/ai08 0006 (accessed 2 October 2010). Gillett, Sue. “Gothic for Girls,” Scarp 21 (1992): 23–24. Comparison with Jane Campion’s film Sweetie. Midalia, Susan. “Re-Writing Woman: Genre Politics and Female Identity in Kate Grenville’s Dreamhouse,” Australian Literary Studies 16.1 (May 1993): 30– 37. Perkins, Elizabeth. “Characters in Search of History: Five Contemporary Australian Novels,” in Australian Writing Now, ed. Manfred Jurgensen & Robert Adamson (Bicentennial issue of Outrider; Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988): 58–71 (esp. 60, 68–70). Rombouts, Alexandra. “ ‘ Admitting the Intruder’ – A Study of the Gothic in Five Contemporary Australian Novels” (doctoral dissertation, University of Queensland, 1994). Comparison with David Malouf, Child’s Play, Tim Winton, In the Winter Dark, Elizabeth Jolley, The Well, and Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector. Tucker, Shirley. “Out of Context: Transplanted Characters in Pauline Chan’s Traps,” Rubicon 1.2 (Special Issue: “Refractions: Asian/Australian Writing,”

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ed. Wenche Ommundsen & Marian Boreland, 1995): 78–89. Extensive comparative mention. Turcotte, Gerry. “Footnotes to an Australian Gothic Script,” Antipodes 7.2 (December 1993): 127–34 (esp. 131–32). ——. “How Dark Is My Valley: Canadian and Australian Gothic,” Scarp 22 (May 1993): 26–32 (esp. 32).

2.4 2.4.1

Joan Makes History Reviews

Anon. “Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville,” Belles-Lettres (U S A ) 5.1 (Fall 1989): 30. Anderson, Don. “You’ve Met Joan – Our Everywoman,” Sydney Morning Herald (30 April 1988), Spectrum: 70. Bennett, Bruce. “A Woman Through History,” Weekend Australian (14–15 May 1988), Magazine: 19. Bird, Delys. “Kate Grenville, Joan Makes History,” Westerly 33.3 (September 1988): 87–88. Breen, Fiona. “Joan Gives Credit to All Our Unknown Heroines,” Mercury (25 June 1988), Weekend Review: 20. Bretag, Tracey. “Mum’s the Word: Feminist Theory and the Representation of Motherhood in Three Novels by Contemporary Australian Women Writers” (Honours dissertation, University of Adelaide, 1994). Elizabeth Jolley, The Sugar Mother; Thea Astley, Vanishing Points; Grenville, Joan Makes History. Clark, Manning. “Rewriting the Role of Women,” Australian Book Review 100 (May 1988): 9–10. England, Katharine. “Destiny Forgotten in a Sanctification of the Ordinary,” Advertiser (28 May 1988), Magazine: 8. Flanagan, Martin. “Dusk, Sunlight, Fire,” Overland 112 (October 1988): 77–78. Review of Peter Cowan, Voices; Grenville, Joan Makes History; Mark Henshaw, Out of the Line of Fire. Freeman, Judith. “An Everywoman Named Joan,” Los Angeles Times Book Review (18 December 1988): 9. Halligan, Marion. “Joan Weaves Her Way in the Seamless Robe,” Canberra Times (14 May 1988): B2. Hardie, Melissa. “Making Love, Making Babies or Making Do,” Southerly 49.1 (March 1989): 113–17. Review of Grenville, Joan Makes History and Elizabeth Jolley, The Sugar Mother. Hawley, Janet. “Historic Fantasies,” The Age (28 March 1987), Saturday Extra: 8.



Bibliography

233

Haynes, Roslynn D. “Joan Makes History,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 91–92. Lamb, Karen. “Striking a Blow for the Joans of the World,” Courier–Mail (28 May 1988), Great Weekend: 6. Livett, Jennifer. “History That Might Have Happened,” Island Magazine 36 (Spring 1988): 83–85. Lukin, Judith. “Joan Makes History,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 92. McKernan, Susan. “Fantasy of the Female,” Bulletin (3 May 1988): 127. Matthews, Brian. “The Working Saint,” The Age (30 April 1988), Saturday Extra: 15. Merry, Bruce. “Sightings on Australian Fiction,” L i N Q 16.2 (1988): 108–17 (esp. 113–15). Review of Grenville, Joan Makes History; W.A. Short Story; David Myers, Mudmaps in Paradise. Morrison, Sally. “Not Just a Good Read, It Lingers,” Weekend Australian (14–15 May 1988), Magazine: 19. Nugent, Ann. “Does Joan Make History? If So, in Which Generation?” Blast 6.7 (1988): 22–24. O’Hearn, D.J. “A Bumper Crop,” Fine Line 5 (April 1989): 12–17 (esp. 18). Group review, esp.: John Sligo, Final Things; Murray Bail, Holden’s Performance; Brian Matthews, Louisa; Mark Henshaw, Out of the Line of Fire; Janette Turner Hospital, Charades; Marion Campbell, Not Being Biriam; Frank Moorhouse, Forty-Seventeen; Rodney Hall, Captivity Captive; Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda; David Malouf, Fly Away Peter; Grenville, Joan Makes History; Tim Winton, In the Winter Dark; Alex Miller, Climber on a Mountain. Reiter, David P. “Joan Makes History,” Redoubt 3 (1988): 71–76. Scutt, Jocelynne A. “The ‘Other’ History as Herstory,” The Age Monthly Review (August 1988): 14–15. Sen, Veronica. “History Posing as Fiction Does Not Quite Succeed,” Canberra Times (16 May 1993): 26. Steinberger, Margaret. “Character Who Spans Oz History,” Newcastle Herald (28 May 1988): 10. Turcotte, Gerry. “Joan Makes History,” in The Good Reading Guide: 100 Critics Review Contemporary Australian Fiction, ed. Helen Daniel (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 92.

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Veitch, Kate. “Joan Makes History,” Fremantle Arts Review 3.9 (September 1988): 15. Wells, Julie. “Kate Grenville, Joan Makes History,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal (Melbourne) 6 (Spring 1989): 155–58. White, Judith. “Tale of Unsung Heroines Fails to Strike Right Note,” Sun–Herald (30 April 1988), Your Sunday: 118. Willard, Nancy. “The Nameless Women of the World,” New York Times Book Review (18 December 1988): 7, 9. The Vulture. “Joan Makes History,” Weekend Australian (18–19 January 1997), Magazine: 10. Zengos, Hariclea. “A Woman Full of Greed,” Belles-Lettres (U S A ) 3.6 (July– August 1988): 5. 2.4.2

Articles and Essays

Bastin, Giselle. “From Grand Récit to Petit Histoire: Exploring Historical Cleavage in Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History,” Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 11 (2005): 28–37. Bastin, Giselle. “Pandora’s Voice-Box: Gossip as a Gendered Discourse in the Works of Helen Garner and Kate Grenville” (doctoral dissertation, Flinders University, 2001). Edwards, Brian. “Definition and Exchange: Australian Fiction 1988–90,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 8 (December 1992): 165–73 (esp. 166–67). Gelder, Ken, & Paul Salzman. “Dialogues with History,” in Gelder & Salzman, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction, 1970–88 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 140–65 (esp. 163–65). Goulston, Wendy. “Herstory’s Re / Vision of History: Women’s Narrative Subverts Imperial Discourse in Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 7 (June 1992): 20–27. Huggan, Graham. “Founding Fictions,” in Huggan, Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2007): 44–70 (esp. 65–68). Jacobs, Lyn. “Kate Grenville Makes History,” Rajasthan University Studies in English 23 (1991–92): 38–50. Kerr, Rosemary. “Sociological and Historical Perspectives on Australia as Portrayed by Contemporary Australian Writers,” Commonwealth Review 7.1 (1995–96): 19–27. Repr. in Australian Poetry and Fiction, ed. R.K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige, 1997): 19–27.



Bibliography

235

Korang, Kwaku Larbi. “ ‘ Africa and Australia’ Revisited: Reading Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History,” Antipodes 17.1 (June 2003): 5–12. Rev. & repr. in Lighting Dark Places, ed. Kossew, 73–91. Matthews, Jill Julius. “ ‘ A Female of All Things’: Women and the Bicentenary,” Australian Historical Studies 23.91 (1988): 90–102. O’Hearn, D.J. “Our Precious Robustness,” in The Larrikin Streak: Australian Writers Look at the Legend, ed. Clem Gorman (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1990): 229–45 (esp. 242–43). Rudra, Natasha. “Grenville Inspired by Voice from the Past,” Canberra Times (28 February 2008): 5. Senn, Werner. “Changing Visions of History: Recent Australian Historical Novels,” Australian Studies 11 (April 1997): 89–99. Sharrad, Paul. “Australian Literature and the Making of History,” Lemuria 1.1 (Winter 2006): 55–74. Strauss, Jennifer. “Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels? An Australian Perspective,” in Major Minorities: English Literatures in Transit, ed. Raoul Granqvist (Cross / Cultures 11; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1993): 35–53 (esp. 45–46). Stummer, Peter O. “The Widening of Horizons as Australian Literature Expands,” in Writing in Australia: Perceptions of Australian Literature in its Historical and Cultural Context, ed. Keil Gerd & Bettina Dose (Hamburg, London, Münster: L I T , 2000): 127–51 (esp. 139, 141). van Herk, Aritha. “Post-Modernism: Homesick for Homesickness,” in The Commonwealth Novel since 1960, ed. Bruce King (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991): 216–30. Comparison with Murray Bail, Homesickness; Robert Kroetsch, Alibi; George Bowering, Caprice. Wenholz, Russel. “Joan Makes Her Mark as ‘Living History’,” Canberra Sunday Times (25 June 2006), Relax: 14. Whitlock, Gillian. “White Diasporas: Joan (and Ana) Make History,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 12 (December 1994): 90–100.

2.5 2.5.1

Dark Places Reviews

Allen, Norma. “Dark Places Lit Up,” Canberra Times (20 November 1995): 13. Altomari, Lisa. “Grenville Takes on the Notion of Monstrosity,” Antipodes 9.1 (June 1995): 49–50. Anderson, Don. “Obsessions of an Australian Psycho in a Suit,” Sydney Morning Herald (1 July 1994), Spectrum: 9.

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Bennie, Angela. “Nobody’s Perfect,” Sydney Morning Herald (31 July 1999), Spectrum: 8. Bliss, Carolyn. “Kate Grenville: Dark Places,” World Literature Today 69.4 (Autumn 1995): 865–66. Brown, Phil. “Superb but Disturbing,” Courier–Mail (30 July 1994), Weekend: 7. Craven, Peter. “Second Look,” The Sunday Age (6 April 2003), Agenda: 10. ——. “Sins of the Father,” Meanjin 53.3 (Spring 1994): 566–70. ——. “Second Look,” The Sunday Age (14 August 2005), Extra: 18. England, Katharine. “Self Discovery,” Advertiser (22 October 1994), Magazine: 15. Ford, Catherine. “Creating Dark Seeds in Dark Places,” The Sunday Age (16 July 1994), Agenda: 8. Fraser, Morag. “Infinite Variety,” Voices 4.4 (Summer 1994–1995): 91–98 (esp. 91–93). Discussion of Wallflowers and Witches: Women and Culture in Australia 1910–1945, ed. Maryanne Dever; Christina Stead: Selected Fiction and Nonfiction, ed. R.G. Geering & A. Segerberg; Grenville, Dark Places; Creating a Nation, 1788–1990, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath & Marian Quartly; Susan Hawthorne & Renate Klein, Australia for Women: Travel and Culture; Drusilla Modjeska, The Orchard; Weddings and Wives, ed. Dale Spender. Geason, Susan. “Kate’s Dirty Old Men,” Sun–Herald (31 July 1994): 122. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. “Perfidious Albion,” Australian Book Review 162 (July 1994): 8–9. Indyk, Ivor. “Lilian’s Graceless Encore,” Weekend Australian (9–10 July 1994), Review: 7. Jopson, Debora. “Grenville’s Dark Places Wins Place in the Sun,” Sydney Morning Herald (20 October 1995): 9. Knight, Lynn. “Into the Asylum,” Times Literary Supplement (2 September 1994): 10. Lesser, Wendy. “Prologue to a Rape,” New York Times Book Review (11 December 1994): 7. Lucas, Robin. “Albion Much More Than a Monster,” Bulletin (19 July 1994): 89. Maiden, Jennifer. “Play with the Problem of Evil,” Overland 141 (Summer 1995): 82–84 (esp. 84). Review of Beverley Farmer, The House in the Light; Alex Miller, The Sisters; Rod Wayman, Still Life; Grenville, Dark Places; Rod Jones, Billy Sunday. Nieuwenhuizen, John. “Forecasts,” Australian Bookseller & Publisher 73.1047 (May 1994): 31. Smith, Hamilton. “Unexpected Humour in Dark Places,” Canberra Times (6 August 1994), Magazine: C11.



Bibliography

237

Sorensen, Rosemary. “Revenge of the Cur,” The Age (22 July 1994), Saturday Extra: 7. Steward, Meg. “Creative Spirit,” Sydney Morning Herald (22 August 1995): 22. Sullivan, Jane. “Out of the Dark,” The Age (14 August 1999), Saturday Extra: 7. 2.5.2

Articles and Essays

Thomson, Helen. “Madness as a Postcolonial Strategy of National Identity in Peter Carey’s Illywhacker and Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Dark Places,” in Australian Nationalism Reconsidered: Maintaining a Monocultural Tradition in a Multicultural Society, ed. Adi Wimmer (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1999): 172–80.

2.6 2.6.1

The Idea of Perfection Reviews

Anderson, Don. “How to Make an Australian Quilt,” Australian Book Review 214 (September 1999): 31–32. Anon. “The Sunday Age Book Focus: The Idea of Perfection,” The Sunday Age (5 August 2001), Agenda: 11. Anon. “The Sunday Age Book Focus: The Idea of Perfection: Week Two: Discussion Points,” The Sunday Age (19 August 2001), Agenda: 11. Anon. “The Sunday Age Book Focus: The Idea of Perfection: Week Three: What the Author and Critics Say,” The Sunday Age (26 August 2001), Agenda: 11. Arndt, Ruth, Bridget Brooklyn, Jack Palmer & Bron Sibree. “A Search for Perfection in a Quilt of Many Characters,” Canberra Times (3 October 1999): 18. Barry, Elaine. “Book Talk,” Australian Review of Books 5.3 (April 2000): 18. Brownrigg, Sylvia. “Engineering Romance,” New York Times Book Review (23 June 2002): 16. Condon, Matt. “A Bridge Too Far,” Sun–Herald (12 September 1999), Sunday Life: 31. Craven, Peter. “The Feel-Good Factor of a Pastoral Paradox,” The Age (21 August 1999), Saturday Extra: 9. Dempsey, Dianne. “Hot Under the Collar,” Weekend Australian (28–29 August 1999), Review: 15. England, Katharine. “Perfect Perceptions,” Advertiser (4 September 1999), Weekend: 23. Livett, Jennifer. “Nobody’s Perfect,” Island 82 (Autumn 2000): 29–32. Modjeska, Drusilla. “Dots on the Landscape,” Australian Review of Books 5.2 (March 2000): 3–4.

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Morrison, Sally. “Country Strife,” Australian Review of Books 4.7 (11 August 1999): 3, 27. Review of Grenville, The Idea of Perfection; Thea Astley, Drylands: A Book for the World’s Last Reader; John Ferry, Colonial Armidale. Oakley, Barry. “Bridges Over Troubled Waters,” Bulletin (The Book Bulletin) (24 August 1999): 14. Omundsen, Susan. “Shifting Light and Shadow,” Southerly 60.2 (September 2000): 190–92. Ralph, John. “Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection,” Westerly 44.4 (1999): 126–28. Riemer, A.P. “Small Towns, a Kinder View,” Sydney Morning Herald (4 September 1999), Spectrum: 12. Sayer, Mandy. “Perfect Portrait,” Bulletin (3 August 1999): 105–106. Shapcott, Thomas. “Perfectly Bent,” Courier–Mail (21 August 1999), Weekend: 9. Sheahan–Bright, Robyn. “The Idea of Perfection,” Network Review of Books 4 (2001–2002), http://api-network/main/index.php?apply=reviews&webpage= api_reviews&flexedit=&flex_password=&menu_label=&menuID=homely&m enubox=&Review=4511 (accessed 13 November 2010). Walter, Lesley. “After the Dark, the Light,” Hecate’s Australian Women’s Book Review 12 (2000): n.p. 2.6.2

Articles and Criticism

Ham, Rosalie. “Representations of Men and Women of the Bush in Australian Fiction” (Masters in Creative Writing, R M I T University, 2007): 39–53. Comparison with Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded, and Anson Cameron, Silences Long Gone. Jones, Dorothy. “Threading Words Together,” New Literatures Review 36 (Winter 2000): 3–16 (esp. 13–15). Martin, Susan K. “The Wood from the Trees: Taxonomy and the Eucalypt as the New National Hero in Recent Australian Writing,” J A S A L 3 (2004): 81–94. Comparison esp. with Murray Bail, Eucalyptus. Rogerson, Margaret. “Australian ‘Everymans’: Post-Medieval Spiritual Adventurers,” in Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, ed. Stephanie Trigg (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2006): 81–97 (esp. 93–95).

2.7 2.7.1

The Secret River Reviews

Anon. “The Secret River,” Publisher’s Weekly (27 March 2006): 54.



Bibliography

239

——. “Kate Grenville: The Secret River,” Kirkus Review 74.6 (15 March 2006): 252. Barnacle, Hugo. “Strangers in an Even Stranger Land,” Sunday Times (19 February 2006), Culture: 55. Review of Jem Poster, Rifling Paradise; Grenville, The Secret River. Battersby, Eileen. “A Life and Dreams Built on Blood,” Irish Times (25 February 2006): 10. Beck, Evelyn. “Kate Grenville, The Secret River,” Library Journal (1 April 2006): 82. Bedell, Geraldine. “Bush Ballad,” Observer (22 January 2006), Books: 28. Bradstreet, Jack. “Fetishism,” Australian Book Review 276 (November 2005): 4. Letter to Editor. ——. “Text Misses the Point,” Australian Book Review 278 (February 2006): 5. Letter to Editor. Breen, Shannon. “Journey Through Murky Water,” Australian Women’s Book Review 19.1 (2007), http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/awsr/new_site/awbr_archive /143/journeythroughmurkey.htm (accessed 13 November 2010). Brice, Chris. “Dredging the Past,” Advertiser Magazine (22 July 2006), Review: 9. Brown, Helen. “When God Was As Foreign as a Fish,” Telegraph (U K ; 5 February 2006), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3652863/A-writerslife-Kate-Grenville.html (accessed 28 October 2010). Brown, Phil. “What Kate Did Next,” Brisbane News (21–27 September 2005): 10–11. Carr, Richard. “New Narrative, Old Story,” Antipodes 20.2 (December 2006): 201–202. Clarke, Stella. “A Challenging Look at the Familiar Territory of Old Australia,” Weekend Australian (25–26 June 2005), Review: 8–9. ——. “Havoc in History House,” Weekend Australian (4–5 March 2006), Review: 8–9. ——. “Taking History on Trust,” A L R : Australian Literary Review 1.1 (September 2006): 12–13. ——. “Wading into the Deep Waters of History,” Weekend Australian (7–8 October 2006), Review: 12–13. Collins, Felicity. “Historical Truth and the Allegorical Truth of Colonial Violence in The Proposition,” Cultural Studies Review 14.1 (March 2008): 55–71 (esp. 56–77). Comparison between The Secret River and John Hillcoat’s film The Proposition. Craven, Peter. “Tragedy in Black and White,” The Age (9 July 2005), Review: 5. England, Katharine. “On a River of Dreams,” Advertiser (2 July 2005), Review: 10.

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Falconer, Delia. “At the Birth of a Tour de Force,” Sydney Morning Herald (2–3 September 2006), Spectrum: 32–33. ——. “The Wiseman of Getting,” The Age (2 September 2006), A2: 21. Goldsmith, Francisca. “Adult Books for High School Students,” School Library Journal 52.12 (December 2006): 44. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. “A Room Made of Leaves and Air,” Australian Book Review 273 (August 2005): 10–11. Griffiths, Jane. “Australia Owned,” Times Literary Supplement (10 February 2006): 23. Griffiths, Tom. “To Recover Our Past by Method, Not Make-Believe,” Sydney Morning Herald (21 October 2006), Spectrum: 32. Review of Quarterly Essay: Who Owns the Past. Hirst, John. “Forget Modern Views When Bringing Up the Past,” Australian (20 March 2006): 10. Hughes, Juliette. “When the Past is Always Present,” The Age (13 August 2005), Review: 8. Ley, James. “When the Past isn’t Past: A Role for Fiction in Australia’s History Wars,” Times Literary Supplement (19 May 2006): 23. Discussion of Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang; Alex Miller, Journey to the Stone Country; Andrew McGahan, The White Earth; Brian Castro, The Garden Book; Delia Falconer, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers; Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded and Dead Europe; James Bradley, The Resurrectionists; Grenville, The Secret River. Loughran, Ellen. “Kate Grenville, The Secret River,” Booklist (15 April 2006): 36. McAloon, Judy. “Kate Grenville, The Secret River,” School Library Journal 52.10 (October 2006): 187. McKenna, Mark. “Comfort History,” Weekend Australian (18–19 March 2006), Review: 15. ——. “Writing the Past,” Australian Financial Review (16 December 2005), Review: 1–2, 8. Repr. in The Best Australian Essays 2006, ed. Drusilla Modjeska (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2006): 96–110. Mansfield, Susan. “Convict Unbecoming,” Scotsman (4 February 2006): 14. Millar, Anna. “Battle for Survival among the Aborigines Proves a Life Sentence,” Scotland on Sunday (22 January 2006), http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman .com/books/Battle-for-survival-among-the.2744442.jp (accessed 22 October 2010). Moorehead, Caroline. “Amnesia in Australia,” New York Review of Books (16 November 2006): 14–15. Review of Exiles and Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era, ed. Patricia Tyron MacDonald; Robert Hughes,



Bibliography

241

The Fatal Shore; Thomas Keneally, The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia; Grenville, The Secret River; Roger McDonald, The Ballad of Desmond Kale; Eva Sallis, Marsh Birds; Linda Jaivin, The Infernal Optimist. Murray, Robert. “Hollywood on the Hawkesbury,” Quadrant 51.4 (April 2007): 67–69. Oakley, Barry. “The Ferryman Pays,” Bulletin (19 July 2005): 68–69. O’Brien, Sean. “Lands of Beauty, Lands of Blood,” Independent (24 February 2006), http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/thesecret-river-by-kate-grenville-526126.html (accessed 28 October 2010). Owen, Katie. “Outrages in the Outback,” Telegraph (U K ; 6 February 2006), http: //www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3649894/Outrages-in-the-outback .html (accessed 22 October 2010). Penhallurick, Ann. “Kate Grenville, The Secret River,” Southerly 66.1 (2006): 194–97. Poster, Jem. “Cultures in Collision,” Guardian (28 January 2006), http://www .guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jan/28/featuresreviews.guardianreview22 (accessed 22 October 2010). Preston, Edwina. “Grey Areas,” Limelight (July 2005): 36–37. Purucker, Mary. “Kate Grenville, The Secret River,” Kliatt 41.1 (January 2007): 48–49. Riemer, A.P. “Original Sins of the Founding Fathers,” Sydney Morning Herald (2–3 July 2005), Spectrum: 20. Rudra, Natasha. “Grenville Inspired by Voice from the Past,” Canberra Times (28 February 2008): 5. Sethi, Anita. “To Die For,” New Statesman (13 February 2006): 55. Sorensen, Rosemary. “River of Enchantment,” Courier–Mail (2–3 July 2005), BAM: 8. Stager, Fiona. “The Secret River,” Australian Bookseller & Publisher 85.1 (July 2005): 34. Steger, Jason. “New Frontier Makes Fantastic Fiction,” The Age (14 May 2005), Review: 6. ——. “It’s All Write: The Inside Story of Fiction, History,” The Age (24 August 2009): 18. Steyn, Stefaan. “Conquest at a Price,” Herald–Sun (3 August 2010), Learn: 56. Stubbings, Diane. “Picking Up the Dropped Stitches of Our History,” Canberra Times (24 September 2005), Panorama: 12–13. ——. “River Reveals Secrets of a Country’s Past,” Canberra Times (2 July 2005), Panorama: 12.

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Sullivan, Jane. “Skeletons Out of the Closet,” The Age (2 July 2005), Review: 1–2. ——. “Making a Fiction of History. . . ,” The Age (21 October 2006), A2: 12–13. ——. “History Sets the Festival Afire,” The Age (29 August 2009), A2: 25. Taylor, Ihsan. “Paperback Row, Book Review Desk,” New York Times Book Review (27 May 2007): 24. Vaughan, Joanna. “Drift Back in Time with the Secret River,” Advertiser (1 July 2006): 24. Williams, Michael. “Breaking Convention,” Australian Book Review 277 (December 2005–January 2006): 6. Letter to the Editor. Wyndham, Susan. “Beauty in a Blank Expression,” Sydney Morning Herald (16– 17 July 2005), Spectrum: 19. 2.7.2

Articles and Essays

Barbour, Judith. “The Comic Poetry of Suffering: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,” Southerly 67.1–2 (March 2007): 423–34. Bradley, James. “The History Question: Correspondence,” Quarterly Essay 24 (December 2006): 72–76. Brady, Veronica. “Borders, Identity and the Question of Australia,” Le Simplegadi (Udine) 5.5 (November 2007): 56–61. Also treats Andrew McGahan, The White Earth. Brice, Chris. “Meet the Author: Kate Grenville, Dredging the Past,” Advertiser (22 July 2006), Magazine: 9. Brosch, Renate. “Kate Grenville, The Secret River,” in Novels, ed. Klaus Stierstorfer, Susanne Peters & Laurenz Volkmann (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008): 227–44. Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (October 2006): 2–72. ——. “The Question of History: Response to Correspondence,” Quarterly Essay 25 (February 2007): 73–77. Collins, Eleanor. “Poison in the Flour,” Meanjin 65.1 (March 2006): 38–47. Rev. & repr. as “Poison in the Flour: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River” in Lighting Dark Places, ed. Sue Kossew, 167–78. Colomba, Caterina. “History and Fiction: Kate Grenville Explores the Murky Depths of Australia’s Past in The Secret River,” in Bernard Hickey, A Roving Cultural Ambassador: Essays in his Memory, ed. Maria Renata Dolce & Antonella Riem (Undine: Forum Editrice Universitaria Udinese, 2009): 85–100. Dale, Leigh, & Chris Tiffin. “New Literatures 2: Australia,” The Year’s Work In English Studies 87.1 (2008): 1122–43, 1122–23, 1130, 1136. Refers to The Secret River, Searching for the Secret River, and the “history wars” and to



Bibliography

243

Grenville’s essay “Saying the Unsayable,” in Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds, ed. Susan Sheridan & Paul Genoni. It also refers briefly to Alice Healy’s essay “ ‘ Impossible Speech’ and the Burden of Translation: Lilian’s Story from Page to Screen.” Dunya, Lindsay. “Colonisation, Convicts, and National Convictions: C.J. Koch’s Out of Ireland and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,” in Fact and Fiction: Readings in Australian Literature, ed. Amit Sarwal & Reema Sarwal (New Delhi: Authorspress, 2008): 42–56. Duthie, Fiona Maree. “The Nineteenth Century in the Recent Australian Imaginary” (doctoral dissertation, University of Queensland, 2007). Section on representations of violent relations, incl. Mudrooroo, Mark Svendsen, Carmel Bird, Jack Davis, Eric Willmot, Grenville, Robert Drewe, Thea Astley, and Sam Watson. Fitzgerald, Michael. “Watery Grave of Secrets,” Time (Australian edition, 7 September 2007): 72–79. Gall, Adam. “Taking/Taking Up: Recognition and Frontier in Grenville’s The Secret River,” J A S A L (Special Issue: “The Colonial Present: Australian Writing for the Twenty-First Century,” 2008): 94–104. Grenville, Kate. “The Writing of The Secret River,” Arts 27 (2005): 74–86. ——. “The Forum: Kate Grenville: On the Historian Within,” Weekend Australian (13–14 August 2005), Review: 2. ——. “The Question of History: Response,” Quarterly Essay 25 (February 2007): 66–72. Hasluck, Nicholas. “Thought Crimes and Other Themes in Commonwealth Literature,” Quadrant 52.5 (May 2008): 36–43. Discussion of Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country; J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace; Peter Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith; Grenville, The Secret River; Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip. Hecq, Dominique. “Passports to the Past,” Etchings 2 (2007): 164–73 (esp. 172). Hennessy, Rachel. “Whose Shoes? Writing ‘The Heaven I Swallowed’ ” (vol. 2 of Hennessy, doctoral dissertation novel “The Heaven I Swallowed,” University of Adelaide, 2009): 38–48. Kossew, Sue. “Voicing the ‘Great Australian Silence’: Kate Grenville’s Narrative of Settlement in The Secret River,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42.2 (June 2007): 7–18. McGonegal, Julie. “The Great Canadian (and Australian) Secret: The Limits of Non-Indigenous Knowledge and Representation,” E S C : English Studies in Canada 35.1 (March 2009): 67–83.

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McLaren, John. “The Shame of Cultural Warriors: Literature,” Overland 186 (Autumn 2007): 34–37. McNamara, Noela. “Literary Legacies: Vanquishing Images of the Past,” International Journal of the Humanities 5.5 (2007): 185–90. Compared with Katherine S. Prichard, Coonardoo, and Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves. Maral, Louise. “Making History Real through Fiction – A Talk by Kate Grenville,” University of Sydney (19 September 2005): News, http://www.usyd.edu .au /news/84.html?newsstoryid=687 (accessed 1 October 2010). Matthews, Brian. “Riding on the ‘Uncurl’d Clouds’: The Intersections of History and Fiction,” in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. Peter Pierce (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2009): 584. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing,” T E X T : The Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (October 2007), http://www.textjournal .com.au (accessed 22 October 2010). Pinto, Sarah. “Emotional Histories and Historical Emotions: Looking at the Past in Historical Novels,” Rethinking History 14.2 (June 2010): 189–207. Probyn–Rapsey, Fiona. “Complicity, Critique, and Methodology,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 38.2–3 (April–July 2007): 65–82 (esp. 72–73). Stitson, Roger. “Torrent of Grief,” The Age (19 May 2008), Education: 8. Sutherland, Emily, & Tony Gibbons. “Historical Fiction and History: Members of the Same Family,” T E X T : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 13.2 (October 2009), http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct09 /sutherland_gibbons.htm (accessed 22 October 2010). Discussion of Grenville, The Secret River, and James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason. van Herk, Aritha. “Hanging Out the Laundry: Heroines in the Midst of Dirt and Cleanliness,” in Canon Disorders: Gendered Perspectives on Literature and Film in Canada and the United States, ed. Eva Darias Beautell & María Jesús Hernáez Lerena (Logroño: La Universidad de la Rioja & Tenerife: Universidad de La Laguna, 2007): 23–44.

2.8 2.8.1

The Lieutenant Reviews

Anon, “Kate Grenville: The Lieutenant,” Kirkus Review (15 August 2009): n.p. ——. “The Lieutenant,” Publishers Weekly (13 July 2009): 35. ——. “The Lieutenant,” New Yorker (12 October 2009): 123. ——. “Canongate Salutes Grenville Follow-Up,” Bookseller (18 July 2008): 15. Atkins, Lucy. “The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville,” Sunday Times (U K ; 15 February 2009), Features: 50.



Bibliography

245

Bradley, James. “Accommodating the Past,” Australian Book Review 305 (October 2008): 24–25. Clark, Lucy. “First Affinity,” Sunday Mail (12 October 2008): 18. Clarke, Stella. “Still Not Settled,” A L R : Australian Literary Review 3.9 (October 2008): 3–4. Clode, Danielle. “Honest About History,” A L R : Australian Literary Review 3.10 (November 2008): 26. Condon, Matthew. “Consuming Taste for Our Early History,” Courier–Mail (20– 21 September 2008), etc: 20. ——. “On History’s Page,” Advertiser (25 October 2008): 13. Pre-publication interview. England, Katharine. “Seeds of History,” Advertiser (4 October 2008): 12. Flanery, Patrick Denman. “Learning Cadigal,” Times Literary Supplement (30 January 2009): 20. Fry, Don. “The Lieutenant,” Virginia Quarterly Review 86.2 (Spring 2010): 219. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. “Negotiating with the Past,” The Age (27 September 2008), A2: 23. Gonis, Anastasia. ‘The Lieutenant,” Bookseller & Publisher Magazine 88.5 (Summer 2008–2009): 23. Grenville, Kate. “Historical Fiction – SlowT V : Kate Grenville on The Lieutenant (Parts 1 and 2),” The Monthly (October 2008), http://www.themonthly.com.au /video/historical-fiction (accessed 1 October 2010). Festival of Ideas (University of Melbourne). Streaming video, 22m 39s and 9m 9s. Guest, Katy. “Uplifting Tale of a Quiet Man Who Sees Truth in Words,” Independent (20 February 2009): 30–31. Keenan, Catherine. “A Historical Balancing Act,” The Age (20 September 2008), A2: 24–25. ——. “Hooked on History,” Sydney Morning Herald (20–21 September 2008), Spectrum: 30–31. Krauth, Nigel. “Trip into the Past Darkly,” Weekend Australian (11–12 October 2008), Review: 10–11. Limprecht, Eleanor. “Mirror Image is Softer,” Sun–Herald (28 September 2008), Extra: 11. McCulloch, Alison. “Australian Encounters,” New York Times Book Review (27 September 2009): 18. McClements, Melissa. “The Lieutenant,” Financial Times (2 February 2009), http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/24d923ce-ee5b-11dd-b791-0000779fd2ac.html (accessed 22 October 2010).

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McDowell, Lesley. “The Lieutenant, By Kate Grenville,” Independent (7 February 2010), http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews /the-lieutenant-by-kate-grenville-1888519.html (accessed 22 October 2010). Marx, Bill. “ The Lieutenant: A Novel’ by Kate Grenville,” Los Angeles Times (6 September 2009), http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-kategrenville6-2009sep06,0,4876320.story (accessed 22 October 2010). Metherell, Gia, & Diane Stubbings. “British Author Attacks Grenville as Naval Novel Ignites History War,” Canberra Times (24 September 2008): 3. Midalia, Susan. “This Year’s Work in Fiction, 2008–2009,” Westerly 54.1 (July 2009): 51–64 (esp. 55–56). Minion, Lynne. “Just the Spot for their Plots,” Canberra Times (13 September 2008): 4–5. Review of Grenville, The Lieutenant; Frank Moorhouse, Palais des Nations; Anthony Hill, Soldier Boy: The True Story of Jim Martin the Youngest Anzac and Captain Cook’s Apprentice. Mundow, Anna. “Innocents Abroad,” Boston Globe (18 October 2009): 4. Nichols, Ian. “Review,” West Australian (18 October 2008), Magazine: 28. Noonan, Kathleen. “Lobbing Little Grenades,” Courier–Mail (27–28 September 2008), etc: 36. Parini, Jay. “Heavenly and Earthly Bodies,” Guardian (31 January 2009), http: //www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/31/the-lieutenant-kate-grenville (accessed 22 October 2010). Peterson, Kelsy. “Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant,” Library Journal (1 July 2009): 84. Pitt, David. “The Lieutenant,” Booklist (1 September 2010): 57–58. Pressley, Alison. “A Conversation with Kate Grenville,” Good Reading (October 2008): 12–13. Pybus, Cassandra. “ ‘ Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company’: A Transnational Perspective on the Saintly William Dawes,” History Australia 6.1 (April 2009): 12.1–12.7. Quinn, Mary Ellen. “The Lieutenant,” Booklist (1 August 2009): 31. Riemer, A.P. “On an Uneasy Voyage of Self-Discovery,” Sydney Morning Herald (27–28 September 2008), Spectrum: 32–33. Sethi, Anita. “Who’s Afraid of the Dark?” Independent on Sunday (8 February 2009), Review: 22–23. Shriver, Lionel. “The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville,” Telegraph (U K ; 21 February 2009), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/4736 153/TheLieutenant-by-Kate-Grenville-review.html (accessed 22 October 2010). Smith, Margaret. “What Might Have Been...,” Koori Mail (5 November 2008): 53.



Bibliography

247

Sorensen, Rosemary. “Past Imperfect,” Weekend Australian (20–21 September 2008), Review: 4–5. Stubbings, Diane. “Finding the World Within,” Canberra Times (27 September 2008): 8. Thompson, Christina. “What Might Have Been,” The Monthly 40 (November 2008): 68–70. Thompson, Veronica. “An Astronomer’s Record of an Intimate Friendship: Review of The Lieutenant,” Antipodes 23.2 (December 2009): 214–15. Urquhart, James. “The Lieutenant,” Financial Times (6 February 2010): 17.

3.1–4 3.1 3.1.1

Non-Fiction/ On Writing The Writing Book Reviews

Bird, Carmel. “Yes Virginia, Writing Can Be Taught,” The Age (31 March 1990), Saturday Extra: 9. Cummings, Katherine. “The Complete Novice’s Guide to Writing Well, after a Fashion,” Sydney Morning Herald (12 May 1990), Books: 78. Review of Garry Disher, Writing Fiction; Keith Waterhouse, Waterhouse on Newspaper Style; Grenville, The Writing Book. England, Katharine. “Valuable Source Work for Would-Be Novelists,” Advertiser (11 August 1990), Magazine: 14. Flanagan, Josephine. “Writing? Read On. . . , ” Herald (19 May 1989): 13. Hugo, Giles. “Burke and His Bloody Peers,” Mercury (21 April 1990), Weekend Review: 17. Jach, Antoni. “Out of the Garret, into the Classroom,” Sunday Herald (8 April 1990): 34. Job, Peg. “Some Sensible Advice on Writing,” Canberra Times (26 May 1990), Saturday Magazine: B9. Mark, Kevin. “Forecasts,” Australian Bookseller & Publisher (December 1989January 1990): 28, 32. Nelson, Penelope. “Hard Facts on Fictional Techniques,” Australian Magazine (28–29 April 1990), Weekend: 7. O’Malley, Jeanne. [Untitled], Redoubt 10 (1990): 56–57. Talbot, Norman. “Tips for Budding Writers,” Newcastle Herald (14 April 1990): 10.

248

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LIGHTING DARK PLACES

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Making Stories Reviews

Bird, Carmel. “The Words to Do It,” Australian Book Review 149 (April 1993): 10–11. Douglas, Kate. “Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written,” J A S Review 4 (2002): np. Also in Network Review of Books 4 (2001–2002), http: //api-network/main/index.php?apply=reviews&webpage=api_reviews&flexedit =&flex_password=&menu_label=&menuID=homely&menubox=&Review=52 13 (accessed 22 October 2010).

Hefner, Bob. “Writers Who Wrote About Other Writers,” Canberra Times (3 October 1993): 28. Report on a reading from Kate Grenville and Sue Woolfe’s Making Stories at Tilley’s [Canberra]. Kelen, S.K. “10 Australian Writers Discuss the Trials and Tribulations of Their Craft,” Canberra Times (3 July 1993), Saturday Magazine: C8. Kleu, Tony. “New Paperbacks,” Sydney Morning Herald (21 May 1993), Spectrum: 44. Lamb, Karen. “Australian Writers and their Backstage Stories,” The Age (8 May 1993), Saturday Extra: 8. Lever, Susan. “The Cult of the Author,” Australian Literary Studies 16.2 (October 1993): 229–33 (esp. 230–31). Maniaty, Tony. “D I Y Writing,” Weekend Australian (24–25 April 1993), Weekend: 7. McDonald, Roger. “Authority of Authors,” Bulletin (25 May 1993): 94–95. Riemer, A.P. “Forecasts,” Australian Bookseller & Publisher (February 1993): 26. Swinnerton, Russ. [Untitled], Redoubt 16 (1993): 115–16.

3.3 3.3.1

Writing From Start to Finish: A Six Step Guide Reviews

Adelaide, Debra. “In Short,” Sydney Morning Herald (1–2 September 2001), Spectrum: 19. Sussex, Lucy. “Cover Notes,” West Australian (8 September 2001), Magazine: 8.

3.4 3.4.1

Searching For the Secret River Reviews

Breen, Shannon. “Journey Through Murky Water,” Australian Women’s Book Review 19.1 (2007), http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/awsr/new_site/awbr_archive /143/journeythroughmurkey.htm (accessed 13 November 2010).



Bibliography

249

Clarke, Stella. “Wading into the Deep Waters of History,” Weekend Australian (7–8 October 2006), Review: 12–13. Falconer, Delia. “The Wiseman of Getting,” The Age (2 September 2006), A2: 21. Healy, Alice. “When ‘History Changes Who We Were’,” Australian Literary Studies 23.4 (October 2008): 481–89. Review essay on Grenville, Searching for the Secret River; Inga Clendinnen, “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?”; Ann Curthoys & John Docker, Is History Fiction? Lynch, Gay. “Apocryphal Stories in Kate Grenville’s Searching for the Secret River,” T E X T : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 13.1 (April 2009), http://www.textjournal.com.au/april09/lynch.htm (accessed 22 October 2010).

4

General Articles and Essays on Grenville

Baker, Candida. “Kate Grenville,” in Baker, Yacker 3 (Sydney: Picador, 1989): 100–29. Behrendt, Larissa. “What Lies Beneath,” Meanjin 65.1 (March 2006): 4-12. Bird, Delys. “New Narrations: Contemporary Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Webby (Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 2000): 183–208 (esp. 200, 205). Craven, Peter. “The Gothic Grenville, or Kate Makes Rhetoric,” Scripsi 6.3 (1990): 238–58.

Dobb, Michele Fay. “Corporeal Acts: Performance, Embodiment and Play in Kate Grenville’s Fiction from Dreamhouse to Dark Places” (doctoral dissertation, University of Western Australia, 2001). Edwards, Vanessa. “ ‘ The Space in Between’: The Battle for Spatial Supremacy in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Dark Places” (MA thesis, University of New England, 1996). Ellam, Julie. “Kate Grenville,” in British Council, Contemporary Writers (2007; since updated), http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth568DEC 7718d4a1B352kGy17E8B6B (accessed 1 October 2010). Ellison, Jennifer. “Kate Grenville,” in Ellison, Rooms of Their Own (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986): 152–71. Gelder, Ken. “The Novel,” Australian Literary Studies 13.4 (1988): 503–19 (esp. 518). ——, & Paul Salzman. “The Women’s Story,” in Gelder & Salzman, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction, 1970–88 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989): 54–81 (esp. 77–78).

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Gilbert, Pam. “Kate Grenville,” in Coming Out From Under: Contemporary Australian Woman Writers, ed. Pam Gilbert (London & Sydney: Pandora, 1988): 25–42. Hasluck, Nicholas. “The Past’s Deceitful Dream,” Island Magazine 39 (1989): 76–83 (esp. 81). Haynes, Roslynn D. “Fatalism and Feminism in the Fiction of Kate Grenville,” World Literature Written in English 31.1 (Spring 1991): 60–79. Hernon, Fran. “Kate: Standing Up for the Small People,” Mercury (14 May 1988), Weekend Review: 17. Hirst, John. Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2005). Huggan, Graham. ‘Beginning Again,” in Huggan, Australian Literature: Postcolonialsim, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2007): 65–68. Jose, Mridula. “The Return of the Oppressed: Re-Writing the Female Self in Lilian’s Story and Joan Makes History,” in Cultural Interfaces, ed. S.K. Sareen, Sheel C. Nuna & Malate Mathur (New Delhi: Indialog, 2004): 100–106. Kelada, Odette. “ ‘ As the Past Coils Like a Spring’: Bridging the History of Australian Women Writers with Contemporary Australian Women Writers’ Stories,” Lilith 15 (2006): 48–60. Knox, Malcolm. “Stories in the Wrong Tense,” Sydney Morning Herald (8 December 2001), Spectrum: 8. Masih, Atiqa. “Kate Grenville’s Mythopoeic Imagination: A Study of Her Novels,” in Caring Cultures: Sharing Imaginations Australia and India, ed. Anuraag Sharma & Pradeep Trikha (New Delhi: Sarup, 2006): 131–41. Mercer, Gina. “Newer Voices, 2: Kate Grenville,” Southerly 45.3 (September 1985): 295–300. Lilian’s Story and Bearded Ladies. Tétaz, Carolyn. “Kate Grenville’s Enduring Witches: Bearded Ladies/ Dreamhouse and Joan Makes History,” Australian Book Review 247 (December 2002): 65. Turcotte, Gerry. “‘The Ultimate Oppression’: Discourse Politics in Kate Grenville’s Fiction,” World Literature Written in English 29.1 (Spring 1989): 64–85. ——. “ ‘ A Shocking Bad Book To Be Sure, Sir’: The Gothic as Counter-Discursive Strategy in Margaret Atwood’s and Kate Grenville’s Fiction,” in Turcotte, Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction (New Comparative Poetics 21; Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009): 203–13. Dreamhouse, Lilian’s Story.



Notes on Contributors

B I L L A S H C R O F T is a founding theorist of postcolonial studies, co-author of

The Empire Writes Back (with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin), the first book to examine systematically and name this field of literary and cultural study. He is author and co-author of sixteen books (including four second editions), variously translated into five languages, and over 140 chapters and articles. He is on the editorial boards of ten international journals. He is Professor of English in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales. R U T H B A R C A N is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (2004) and numerous essays on the body in culture. Her current research project is a book (forthcoming in 2011) on alternative therapies and the senses. E L E A N O R C O L L I N S is a book editor and a scholar of narrative and the novel form. She has degrees from the University of Western Australia and Oxford University, and now lives in Edinburgh. A L I C E H E A L Y has a PhD in Australian Studies from Flinders University. Her

research focuses on the concept of cultural translation and examines contemporary screen adaptations of Australian literature, screenwriting as an artform, and historiography. She has published essays analyzing screen adaptations of the late 1990s. Since 2006, she has been the South Australian representative on the Executive Committee of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (A S A L ). She currently teaches Australian studies at David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research (D U C I E R ) at the University of South Australia. A native of Ghana, K W A K U L A R B I K O R A N G teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies and the Department of Comparative

252

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Studies at Ohio State University. His research interests include African literature, pan-Africanist intellectual history, cultural modernity, nationalism, and postcolonialism. He is the current editor of Research in African Literatures. S U E K O S S E W is Professor of English at Monash University. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and New Literatures Review and has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on postcolonial and South African literature. Her books include, as sole author, Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction (2004) and Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink (1996) and, as editor, Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives (2001, with Dianne Schwerdt) and Critical Essays in World Literature: J.M. Coetzee (1998). She is currently co-editing a volume of essays entitled Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction. K A T E L I V E T T is a lecturer in Literature and Communications at A C U National in Sydney. Her PhD was on fetishism in the work of Gertrude Stein, and she has published also in the areas of cultural studies, gender studies, and animal studies. E L I Z A B E T H M C M A H O N teaches in the School of English Media and Per-

forming Arts at the University of New South Wales. She has published extensively on Australian literature and is currently engaged in a large research project on Australia’s island imaginary. With her colleague Brigitta Olubas, she edited Women Making Time: Contemporary Feminist Critique and Cultural Analysis (2006) and Remembering Patrick White: Contemporary Critical Essays (2010). She is also the co-editor of Southerly, Australia’s oldest literary journal. S A R A H P I N T O is a Lecturer in the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her research interests are in the fields of historical representation, emotion, gender and sexuality studies, and she is currently working on a project on the remembrance of British settler colonialism in settler societies. B R I G I D R O O N E Y teaches in Australian literature at the University of Sydney. She has published essays on a range of writers, including Christina Stead, Patrick White, Helen Garner, and David Malouf, and is the author of Literary Activists: Writer–Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (2009).

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253

Notes on Contributors

L Y N E T T E R U S S E L L is Director of the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies (C A I S ), Monash University. She has published widely in the areas of archaeological theory, Aboriginal history, postcolonialism, and the representation of race. Her books include, as sole author: Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Representations of Australian Aboriginalities (2001) and A Little Bird Told Me (2002); and, as editor: Boundary Writing: An Exploration of Race, Culture, and Gender Binaries in Contemporary Australia (2005); Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous–European Interactions in Settler Colonies – Studies in Imperialism (2001); and Constructions of Colonialism: Perspectives on Eliza Fraser’s Shipwreck (1998, with Ian McNiven & Kay Schaffer). S U S A N S H E R I D A N is Adjunct Professor of English and Women’s Studies at

Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia. Her books include Christina Stead (1988), Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, 1880s to 1930s (1995), and Who Was That Woman? The “Australian Women’s Weekly” in the Postwar Years (2002); as editor: Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (1988); Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (1993, with Sue Rowley and Susan Magarey); and Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006, with Paul Genoni). Her latest book is Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making their Mark (2011).



Index

abjection, xvi, xvii, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 106, 121 Aboriginals See: Indigenous culture abuse, sexual, xiii, 7, 49, 119, 127, 132, 136, 139, 145, 153 See also: incest, rape academy, the, xiv, xv, xix, xx, 22, 23, 29, 35, 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 114, 164, 172, 183, 185, 186, 188, 192, 204 Ackland, Michael, 14, 22 activism, 19, 34 Africa and Australia, xviii, 73, 74, 78, 88, 89, 159, 209 agency, xvii, 121, 126, 132, 149, 192 Ahmed, Sara, 43 Albion’s Story (Grenville = Dark Places), xiii, 11, 56 allegory, xx, xxi, 8, 57, 61, 71, 88, 90, 136, 137 Alther, Lisa, 2 Althusser, Louis, 68 Anderson, Don, 21 Angel at My Table, An (dir. Campion), 139

Angel Baby (dir. Rymer), 139 Angel in the House, 45 Anglo-Celtic culture, xviii, 83 anthropology, 33, 34, 97, 110 anticolonialism, xvii, 14 antiracism, xvii, 14

appropriation, xvi, 67, 71, 86, 107, 207, 208

archival research, xiv, xix, 6, 18, 27, 32, 33, 36, 40, 172, 179, 180, 184, 185, 186, 188, 190, 191, 195, 203, 209, 211 Ashcroft, Bill, xvi, xviii, 73, 74, 88, 89 Astley, Thea, 18, 169; Drylands, 156; A Kindness Cup, 19 Atkinson, Alan, 187, 188, 190, 191 Attwood, Bain, 179, 183, 188, 194 Atwood, Margaret, The Blind Assassin, 27

Austen, Jane, 49 Australianness, xvii, 8, 21, 78, 82, 87, 88, 89, 140, 153, 154, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163

See also: national identity autobiography, 81, 87 avant-gardism, 43, 44, 45, 113 Bad Boy Bubby (dir. De Heer), 139 Ball, Maggie, 157 Barber, Lynden, 139 Barcan, Ruth, xvi, xvii, 121, 122, 123, 137, 146

Barthes, Roland, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120; S/Z, 115; & Maurice Nadeau, 115 Bearded Ladies (Grenville), xii, 3, 4, 21 Behrendt, Larissa, xix Benjamin, Walter, 51 Bennie, Angela, 153, 158

256 Bhabha, Homi K., 75, 76, 77, 79, 83, 85, 86, 88, 138 Bicentennial, 8, 21, 82, 170 Bildungsroman, 6, 56, 120, 147 biography, 6, 19, 26, 170 Birch, Tony, 202, 203 Bird, Delys, 120 Blakeney, Sally, 181, 185 Blind Assassin, The (Atwood), 27 Bloom, Clive, 125 Boadicea, 107 body, the, xvi, 5, 11, 12, 43, 47, 48, 49, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 121, 122, 124, 129, 144, 177 See also: fatness, Lilian’s Story border See under: boundaries Boucher, Leigh, 179 boundaries, xvi, 3, 79, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 115, 121, 137, 138, 144, 149, 168, 202, as trope, xvi, 97, 98, 99, 138 Bradley, James, 202 Brady, Veronica, 8 Brice, Chris, 186, 190 bridge-building, as metaphor, xiii, 158 Brophy, Kevin, 44 Bush, the, xiii, xvii, 7, 12, 64, 65, 66, 68, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 168, 185, 204 Butler, Judith, 135, 137, 142, 143, 144 Campbell, Marion, Lines of Flight, 147 Campion, Jane, dir. An Angel at My Table, 139 Capricornia (Herbert), 19 Carey, Peter, 22; Jack Maggs, 208 Carter, Angela, 2, 199, 204

LIGHTING DARK PLACES

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Carter, David, 26 Cartesianism, 96, 100, 103 Casanova, Pascale, 18 Certeau, Michel de, 113, 114, 136, 143, 145, 146 Chamberlin, J. Edward, 206 city, as trope, 109, 110, 112, 113, 136, 143, 145

Cixous, Hélène, 61, 62, 65 Clark, Manning, 187 Clarke, Stella, 30, 32, 182, 190 Clendinnen, Inga, 17, 20, 30, 31, 33, 35, 173, 179, 181, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 202, 208 Clezy, Bruce, 108 Coleman, Deidre, 179 collective memory, 19, 135, 141, 143, 157 Collins, Eleanor, 182 colonialism, xiii, xiv, xix, 8, 18, 21, 28, 33, 34, 35, 65, 71, 73, 74, 77, 79, 85, 86, 87, 88, 167, 169, 172, 177, 179, 182, 201, 204, 209, 210 colonization, 14, 32, 56, 69, 180, 182, 183, 184, 186 comedy, 2, 5, 9, 11, 12, 21, 104, 120, 144, 153, 156, 157, 161 Condon, Matt, 24, 26 Connell, R.W., 154 Connolly, Keith, 140 contact, colonial, xiv, xx, 28, 169, 173, 175, 188 Conte, Steven, The Zookeeper’s War, 41 controversy See debate, history wars convicts, xiv, 27, 28, 31, 86, 168, 169, 182, 203 Coonardoo (Prichard), 19 Cosi (dir. Joffe), 139, 140 Cotter’s England (Stead), 11 “Country Pleasures” (Grenville), 4 Cracknell, Ruth, 93, 106, 140, 144, 146

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257

Index

Craven, Ian, 139 Craven, Peter, 6, 24, 120, 121 creative arts, 41, 74 creative writing, xv, 33, 40, 41, 44, 52 See also: experimental writing, writing technique, and Grenville Creed, Barbara, 97, 98, 99 Crompton, Helen, 140 Crusoe trope, 168 Currer–Jones, A., 209 Curthoys, Ann, 183, 194, 195

“Drover’s Wife, The” (Lawson), 159 Drylands (Astley), 156

Dark Places (Grenville), xiii, 1, 2, 11–13, 23, 24, 56, 58, 69, 70, 139, 153–54, 165 Dark Places of the Heart (Stead = Cotter’s England), 11 Dark, Eleanor, The Timeless Land, 19 Darwinian discourse, xvi, 154 Darwinism, 69 Davis, Mark, 22 Dawes, William, xiv, 36, 179, 180, 201, 208, 209, 210 Dawson, Paul, 41 debate, xv, xvii, xix, 18, 20, 27, 30, 34, 35, 52, 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 194,

family, xiii, 5, 27, 33, 48, 49, 50, 51, 94, 95, 98, 105, 106, 128, 136, 145, 163, 167, 168, 170, 186 See also: patriarchy Fanon, Frantz, 89 fatness, xvi, 58, 60, 95, 98, 99, 102, 104, 110, 132, 135, 185 See also: body Federation, xvi, 8, 9, 10, 57, 68, 136, 137,

204

De Heer, Rolf, dir. Bad Boy Bubby 139 de Man, Paul, 88, 138, 146 Dening, Greg, 135, 202 Dermody, Susan, & Elizabeth Jacka, 139 Derrida, Jacques, 43, 75 dispossession, xix, 10, 208, 210 Dixson, Miriam, 80, 87 Docker, John, 183, 194, 195 Domaradzki, Jerzy, xvi, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 147, 148, 149 Douglas, Mary, 96, 97, 98, 99, 110, 160, 165

Dreamhouse (Grenville), xii, xv, xvii, 1, 4–6, 21, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 131, 132

Eagleton, Terry, 75, 76, 176 Elliot, Stephan, dir. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 139 Eliot, George, 49 elitism, 18, 27 Ellison, Jennifer, 2, 14, 115 ethnography, 78 experimental writing, xix, 1, 44, 45, 195

154

Felski, Rita, 81, 86 female body See under: body, fatness Female Eunuch, The (Greer), 2, 11 feminism, xii, xvi, xvii, xviii, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 21, 22, 23, 25, 40, 48, 49, 50, 61, 84, 85, 93, 107, 109, 114, 120, 126, 136, 137, 139, 141, 144, 147, 148, 149, 153, 157; and Grenville, 1–14 fiction and history, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xix, 1, 2, 10, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 41, 44, 49, 52, 93, 167, 172, 173, 174, 179–95, 202, 203, 208, 209, 210; feminist, 2 See also: debate, history and fiction film, xv, xvi, 66, 93, 114, 135–49 See also: Jerzy Domaradzki, Lilian’s Story, novel and film First Fleet, xiv, 9, 179, 200, 204

258 first-person narration, 21, 23, 24, 104, 122, 124, 139, 170 See also: focalization, point of view, third-person narration Fitzgerald, Michael, 140 Flanagan, Richard, 22 Flannery, Tim, 179 Flaubert, Gustave, 48, 49 Flinders, Matthew, 85 focalization, narrative, xvi, xviii, 24, 27 See also: first-person narration, point of view, third-person narration foreignness, xvii, 119–32 Foucault, Michel, 51, 58, 109 Franklin, Miles, 49 freedom, xvi, 44, 56, 61, 62, 63, 68, 70, 71, 90, 93, 99, 106, 107, 111, 139, 145, 146, 147 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 45, 123, 130, 131 Friedberg, Anne, 146 Frow, John, 114 Furphy, Sam, 200 Gadigal language, xiv, 199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208 See also: languages, Indigenous Gaita, Raimond, 78 Gall, Adam, 33 Galvin, Peter, 140, 141 Geertz, Clifford, 78 Gelder, Ken, 22, 120; & Paul Salzman, 22, 120 gender, xi, xiii, xv, xvii, 1, 3, 5, 23, 27, 49, 50, 51, 56, 74, 77, 81, 99, 107, 121, 125, 127, 128, 136, 138, 142, 143, 144, 153–65

genre, 19, 40, 120 Gibson, Ross, 180 Gilbert, Pam, 132 Gleeson–White, Jane, xii Goldsworthy, Kerryn, 93

LIGHTING DARK PLACES

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gothic mode, 2, 4, 5, 24, 120, 125 Great Australian Silence, 19, 28, 34 Greer, Germaine, 20; The Female Eunuch, 2, 11 Grenville, Kate See: intellectual, public, Grenville as; prizes, literary, and Grenville; vernacular style, and Grenville; writing technique, and Grenville WORKS: Albion’s Story (= Dark Places), xiii, 11, 56

Bearded Ladies, xii, 3, 4, 21 “Country Pleasures”, 4 Dark Places, xiii, 1, 2, 11–14, 23, 24, 56, 58, 69, 70, 139, 153, 154, 165 Dreamhouse, xii, xv, xvii, 1, 4–6, 21, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 131, 132 The Idea of Perfection, xiii, xv, xvii, 14, 24, 25, 26, 27, 39, 153–65, 170 Joan Makes History, xii, xvii, 1, 2, 8– 10, 21, 74, 78–89, 104, 120, 136, 170, 171

“Kate Grenville on the Historian Within”, 172, 184 The Lieutenant, xiv, xv, xvii, xx, 14, 20, 35–36, 179, 180, 181, 199–210 Lilian’s Story, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, 1, 2, 6–8, 10, 11, 13, 21, 23, 55–71, 93–115, 119, 120, 121, 124, 126, 127, 131, 132, 136, 140, 141, 170; novel and film, 135– 49

“Making Tracks”, 3 “The Question of History: Response,” xiv, 30, 184 “Saying the Unsayable,” 17 Searching for the Secret River, xiii, xv, 32, 33, 39, 40, 45, 47, 52, 182, 202, 203

The Secret River, xiii–xv, xvii, xviii,

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259

Index

xix, 20–34, 35, 36, 52, 167–78, 179–95, 201, 207, 208 “The Space Between,” 3 “The Test Is, If They Drown,” 3 “Why I Write,” 1 “Writers in a Time of Change,” xii The Writing Book: A Manual for Fiction Writers, xv, 24, 39, 44, 45, 46, 52 Writing from Start to Finish, xv, 39 & Sue Woolfe, ed. Making Stories, xv, 39, 121 Griffiths, Tom, 18, 30 Grimshaw, Patricia et al., 10 Grosz, Elizabeth A., 94, 97, 99, 103, 111, 112

gum-tree, in fiction, 25 gynocentrism, 23, 154 Hanson, Pauline, 162 Hawkesbury River area, xiv, 28, 33, 168, 177, 182, 185, 193, 203 Haynes, Roslynn D., 103, 124, 125, 129, 130

Heidegger, Martin, 138 Hemingway, Ernest, 48, 49 Herbert, Xavier, Capricornia, 19 heroines, xvii, 85, 86, 119, 120, 121, 124, 127, 131, 170 heroism, xii, xiii, 9, 82, 86, 107, 113, 122, 132, 157, 162, 163 heterosexuality, 25, 28, 49, 129, 130, 139 Hicks, Scott, dir. Shine 139 Hirst, John, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 187, 188, 191, 192, 193 historians, Australian, xiv, xix, 10, 17, 18, 22, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 83, 85, 174, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 201, 202, 203, 208, 209, 253

historical novel, xiv, xix, 32, 167, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 194 historicism, 76, 83 history, 11, 31, 70, 71, 75, 77, 93; Australian, xii, 8, 19, 22, 29, 31, 32, 52, 57, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 157, 167, 169, 183, 186, 188, 191, 194; hidden, xix; women in, 8, 136 history and fiction, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, xix, 1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 18, 19, 27–30, 33, 35, 36, 41, 48, 52, 56, 65, 70, 71, 79–87, 104, 105, 106, 107, 129, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 143, 147, 149, 157, 163, 167, 170–76, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186–95, 202, 203, 204, 209, 210 history wars, 17, 30, 31, 32, 34, 167, 172, 173, 174, 187, 194, 195 Hogan, P.J., dir. Muriel’s Wedding 139 homelessness, xvii, 119, 121, 122, 126, 128, 132 Homer, 35 horizon of expectation (Jauss), 146 Housekeeping (Robinson), 126 Howard, John, 31 Huggan, Graham, xviii Idea of Perfection, The (Grenville), xiii, xv, xvii, 14, 24, 25, 26, 27, 39, 153–65, 170

incest, 8, 130, 131, 153 See also: abuse, sexual; rape Indigenous culture, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, xx, 9, 10, 19, 28, 33, 34, 36, 84, 85, 86, 148, 149, 163, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181, 182, 183, 186, 195, 200–206, 208 Indyk, Ivor, 23, 24 insularity, 25

260 intellectual, public, Grenville as, xvii, 18– 36, 43, 44, 146, 207

LIGHTING DARK PLACES

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Lawrence, D.H., Women in Love, 161 Lawson, Henry, “The Drover’s Wife,” 80, 159 Lee, Dennis, 64 Leonardo da Vinci, 158 Lieutenant, The (Grenville), xiv, xv, xvii, xx, 14, 20, 35–36, 179, 180, 181, 199–

Jack Maggs (Carey), 208 Jauss, Hans Robert, 146 Jenkins, Keith, 190 Joan Makes History (Grenville), xii, xvii, 1, 2, 8–10, 21, 74, 78–89, 104, 120, 136, 210 Lilian’s Story (Grenville), xii, xiii, xv, 170, 171 xvi, xvii, 1, 2, 6–8, 10, 11, 13, 21, 23, Joan of Arc, 107 Joffe, Mark, dir. Cosi 139, 140 55–71, 93–115, 119, 120, 121, 124, 126, Jong, Erica, 2 127, 131, 132, 136, 140, 141, 170; novel Joyce, James, 45 and film, 135–49 Lines of Flight (Campbell), 147 Kapferer, Bruce, 154 linguistic turn, 43 “Kate Grenville on the Historian Within” Livett, Jennifer, 39 (Grenville) , 172, 184 Lucashenko, Melissa, 33, 203 Keenan, Catherine, xiv Luhrmann, Baz, dir. Strictly Ballroom, Kelly, Ned, 80, 82 139 Keneally, Thomas, 169; Schindler’s Ark, Lukács, Georg, 122, 123 Lynch, Kevin, 112, 113 208 Kiesowski, Krzystof, 140 Lyra–Wex, Marianne, 109, 110 Kindness Cup, A (Astley), 19 Mabo, 176 King Lear (Shakespeare), 100, 142 King’s Cross, 7, 147 McCalman, Iain, 195 Kossew, Sue, 28, 34, 179 McCarthy, Cormac, 22 Koval, Ramona, xiv, 17, 22, 29, 174, 184, McCubbin, Frederick, 168 Macaulay, Zachary, 210 207 Krampen, Martin, 114 MacDonald, Helen, 187, 188 Kristeva, Julia, 96, 97, 98, 99, 119, 123, Macintyre, Stuart, 190, 191, 195; & Anna Clark, 183, 187 124, 128 Mackay, Hugh, 25 Lacan, Jacques, 73, 123, 131 McKenna, Mark, 17, 29, 30, 31, 32, 181, Lake, Marilyn, 10, 179, 191 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, land rights, 19, 34, 177 194 language as cultural mediation, xx McLuhan, Marshall, 206 languages, Indigenous, 179, 200–209 McMahon, Elizabeth, xv, 50 See also: Gadigal language McPhee, Hilary, 22 larrikinism, xiii madness, xvi, 55, 60, 68, 69, 95, 98, 99, Lauretis, Teresa de, 107 100, 101, 104, 107, 111, 119, 126, 127, Law of the Father, 7, 121, 123, 127, 131 128, 129, 131, 137, 139, 142

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261

Index

Making Stories (ed. Grenville & Woolfe), xv, 39, 121 “Making Tracks” (Grenville), 3 Mallon, Anne–Marie, 126 Malouf, David, 136, 169 Man Who Loved Children, The (Stead), 8, 12

Mansfield, Susan, 35 marginalization, xii, xviii, 10, 71, 77, 84, 95, 144, 171 Marlatt, Daphne, 157 Marshall, P. David, 50 Martin, Susan K., 25 masculinity, 5, 11, 23, 59, 80, 111, 154, 155, 160, 161 Matrix, 109 Matthews, Jill Julius, 10, 155 memoir, 19, 26; and Grenville, xiii, xv, 40, 52, 120 Mercer, Gina, 111 Midalia, Susan, 5, 120, 125, 127, 131, 147 middlebrow culture, 26, 27 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), xvi Miles, Bea, xii, xvi, 6, 7, 21, 55, 70, 102, 106, 114, 138, 149, 170 Miller, Christopher, 88, 89 misogyny, 1, 2, 5, 11, 13, 23, 24, 69, 80, 139, 143, 144, 145 Mitchell, Juliet, 7, 84, 85 Mitchell, Peta, 41, 42 mobility, female, xvi, 56, 68, 70, 71, 86, 96, 106, 107, 108, 110 modernism, 45, 46, 48 Moers, Ellen, 5 Mother and Son (T V , dir. Portmann), 144 multiculturalism, 148 Munslow, Alun, 190 Muriel’s Wedding (dir. Hogan), 139 myth, xii, xiii, xvi, 5, 55, 85, 96, 154, 158, 160, 162, 163, 168, 169, 171, 173

Naglazas, Mark, 137 Nash, Margot, Vacant Possession, 139 national identity, xiii, 8, 81, 153, 154, 155, 157, 160, 161, 162 See also: Australianness nationalism, xii, xiii, xviii, 8, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 32, 34, 35, 41, 57, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 136, 137, 140, 153, 154, 155, 157, 160, 162, 164, 168, 169, 171, 173, 182, 186, 193 New South Wales, xiv, 27, 168, 182, 183, 185

Nile, Richard, 19 Niranjana, Tejaswini, 143 non-fiction, 26 Oedipus complex, 7 Ong, Walter J., 206 omniscient narration, 25, 104 Oulipo, 43 parody, 5, 120 patriarchy, xii, xvi, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 21, 23, 25, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 79, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 96, 101, 103, 106, 107, 109, 111, 120, 121, 126, 128, 132, 137, 139, 141, 146 See also: masculinity, phallocentrism Patyegarang, xiv, 179, 180, 200, 208, 209

Perec, Georges, 44 Perloff, Marjorie, 41, 42 Petersen, Kirsten Holst, & Anna Rutherford, 56 phallocentrism, 99 Phillip, Governor, 36 Phillips, Mark Salber, 194 Pinto, Sarah, 182 point of view, narrative, xiii, 10, 13, 94, 103, 104, 173, 174

262 See also: focalization, first-person narration, third-person narration Polanski, Roman, 140 polymorphous perverse, the (Freud), 129, 131, 132 populism, 44 Portmann, dir. Mother and Son (T V ) 144 positivism, 79, 85 postcolonialism, xiii, xvi, xviii, 35, 56, 57, 64, 65, 66, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 85, 86, 88, 89, 190, 195 postfeminism, xvii, 25, 154 postmodernism, 43, 48, 120, 190, 195 poststructuralism, 43, 45, 75 Prichard, Katharine Susannah, Coonardoo, 19 Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (dir. Eliot), 139

prizes, literary, and Grenville, xi, xii, xv, xvii, 21, 27, 51, 182 Propp, Vladimir, 107 psychoanalysis, 44, 45 Pybus, Cassandra, 179, 208, 209 Queensland, 19 Queneau, Raymond, 113 “Question of History: Response, The” (Grenville), xiv, 30, 184 quilting, as trope, xiii, 25, 158, 164, 165 racism, 69, 86, 156, 162, 167, 173 rape, 2, 11, 12, 56, 63, 64, 95, 96, 107, 110, 111, 122, 124, 125, 127, 129 See also: abuse, sexual; incest realism, xviii, xix, 2, 39, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172 Reconciliation Walk, xiii, 19 reconciliation, xiii, xix, xx, 19, 25, 201 resistance, xvii, 56, 57, 61, 66, 74, 113, 120, 143, 193

LIGHTING DARK PLACES



revisionism, historical, 19, 33, 34 Reynolds, Henry, 185, 187 Roach, Vicky, 144 Roberts, Tom, 9 Robinson, Marilynne, Housekeeping, 126 Romanticism, 51, 83, 114, 177, 179 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 141 Rooney, Brigid, xvii, 27, 32, 153 Rorty, Richard, 43 Rowe, Kathleen, 144 Rushdie, Salman, 138, 139; Midnight’s Children, xvi Russell, Penny, 108, 190 Rustin, Emily, 139 Rymer, dir. Angel Baby 139 S/Z (Barthes), 115 sadism, 4, 5, 58 Said, Edward W., 79 Salzman, Paul, 103 Sartre, Jean–Paul, 75, 78, 79, 89 satire, 2 “Saying the Unsayable” (Grenville), 17 Schenk, Susan J., 126, 127 Schindler’s Ark (Keneally), 208 Sea Change (A B C drama series), 26 Searching for the Secret River (Grenville), xiii, xv, 32, 33, 39, 40, 45, 47, 52, 182, 202, 203 Secret River, The (Grenville), xiii, xv, xv, xvii, xix, 20–34, 35, 36, 52, 167–78, 179–95, 201, 202, 207, 208, 209 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 43, 50 settler history and culture, xi, xiii, xiv, xviii, xx, 27, 28, 31, 33, 34, 65, 82, 85, 86, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 193, 201, 209, 210 sexuality, 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 49, 58, 61, 69, 77, 80, 81, 84, 96, 101, 102, 106, 108, 109, 119, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 142, 144, 145, 163, 208



263

Index

Shakespeare, William, xvi, 6, 7, 8, 67, 68, 69, 106, 114, 124, 128, 129, 135, 137, 143, 148; King Lear, 100, 142; Romeo and Juliet, 141; The Tempest, 142 Sheridan, Susan, 8 Shine (dir. Hicks), 139 Sierra Leone, 179, 209 Slemon, Stephen, 78 Smith, Hazel, 44 Sorensen, Rosemary, 185 “Sorry Day” March, xiii Sosnowski, Alexandra, 140 “Space Between, The” (Grenville), 3 space, women’s, 110 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 75, 79, 88, 89

Stanner, W.E.H., 19, 34 Stead, Christina, 7; Dark Places of the Heart (= Cotter’s England), 11; Cotter’s England, 11; The Man Who Loved Children, 8, 12 Stein, Gertrude, 46, 48, 49 Steiner, George, 175 stereotypes, xi, xiii, xvii, 24, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161 Stewart, Meg, 50 Strictly Ballroom (dir. Luhrmann), 139 Stubbings, Diane, 186 suburbia, 25 Sullivan, Jane, 30, 31, 156, 173, 186, 187, 189

Summers, Anne, 8, 9, 102 surrealism, 44 surveillance, 109, 156 Sydney Cove, 10, 36, 179, 180 Sydney, xiii, xiv, xvi, 6, 7, 10, 21, 36, 55, 105, 106, 114, 128, 140, 141, 147–49, 159, 163, 168, 170, 172, 179, 180, 200 Symbolic Order, 97, 123, 126, 127, 131

Tapping, Craig, 78 taxi, as trope, 108, 114, 146, 148 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 142 “Test Is, If They Drown, The” (Grenville), 3 third-person narration, xvi, xix, 5, 23, 24, 27, 104 Thompson, Veronica, 120 Thornton, Mark., 136 Timeless Land, The (Dark), 19 tragic character, xix, 28, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 182 translation, from fiction to film, xvi, 135– 49

Turcotte, Gerry, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 13, 42, 44, 50, 102, 111, 127, 128 University of Technology, Sydney, xv, 41, 52 Vacant Possession (dir. Nash), 139 Varadharajan, Asha, 88 vernacular style, and Grenville, 47, 65, 163

Victorianism, 135, 136, 139, 142, 144, 145 violence, xiv, xix, 77, 84, 85, 100, 122, 124, 125, 126, 131, 143, 172, 173 See also: rape Visontay, Michael, 20 voyeurism, 25 Wajda, Andrzej, 140 Waldren, Murray, 165, 190 Wandor, Michelene, 2 War of Independence, American, 179 Ward, Russel, 139, 154 White, Patrick, xii, 21 White, Richard, 160 Whitlam, Gough, 19, 22

264 “Why I Write” (Grenville), 1 Willbanks, Ray, 100, 104 Wilson, Elizabeth, 43, 109 Windschuttle, Keith, 30, 31, 187 Wiseman, Solomon, xiv, 27, 33, 172, 182, 190, 203 Women in Love (Lawrence), 161 women, Australian, xviii, 20, 84, 86, 87 See also: feminism, history women’s liberation, 2, 86 women’s writing, 2, 4, 5 Woolf, Virginia, 45, 46, 48, 49 Woolfe, Sue, xv, 6, 39, 55, 121, 132 Workers Education Association, 42 Wright, Steve (scriptwriter), xvi “Writers in a Time of Change” (Grenville), xii

LIGHTING DARK PLACES

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Writing Book: A Manual for Fiction Writers, The (Grenville), xv, 24, 39, 44, 45, 46, 52 Writing from Start to Finish (Grenville), xv, 39 writing technique, and Grenville, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, xix, xx, 1, 2, 13, 14, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 33, 35, 39–52, 65, 66, 81, 100, 103, 113, 114, 115, 121, 157, 158, 164, 167, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 193, 194, 202, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209 Wyndham, Susan, 40, 45, 46, 47, 48, 185, 187 Young, Iris Marion, 109, 110 Zookeeper’s War, The (Conte), 41

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