The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature [1 ed.] 0367643561, 9780367643560

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

In recent years, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Christos Tsiolkas, heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the award of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This Companion emerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. It considers works of Australian literature on their own terms, as well as positioning them in their critical and historical context and their ethical and interactive position in the public and private spheres. With an emphasis on literature’s responsibilities, this book claims Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces, and is produced by its context, provoking a critical re-evaluation of the concept of the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts. Jessica Gildersleeve is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. She is the author and editor of several books, including Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision (2017) and Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives (2017, with Richard Gehrmann).

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

Edited by Jessica Gildersleeve

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Jessica Gildersleeve; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jessica Gildersleeve to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-64356-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12416-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

For Harry and Sam, my budding young Australian readers.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations xii Notes on Contributors xiii Acknowledgements xix 1

SECTION A

Literature in the Colony 7 1 Expressing a New Civilisation: Authorship, Publishing, and Reading in the 1890s 9 Roger Osborne 18 3 The Metropolis or the Bush? Megan Brown

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34

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Contents SECTION B

Early Twentieth-Century Australia 45

47

54 63 75

SECTION C

Contemporary Australia 83 85 10 Around 1988: Australian Literature, History, and the Bicentenary 99 Eduardo Marks de Marques 11 Politics and Contemporary Australian Fiction 107 Nicholas Birns 12 Towards a New Direction in Contemporary Criticism: Cognitive Australian Literary Studies 116 Jean-François Vernay SECTION D

Australian Literary Studies in the Public Sphere 123 13 Literary Criticism in Australia 125 Emmett Stinson 14 Obstetric Realism and Sacred Cows: Women Writers and Book Reviewing in Australia 134 Melinda Harvey and Julieanne Lamond viii

Contents

15 Literary Prizes and the Public Sphere 147 Alexandra Dane 16 Literary Media Entertainment: Author Stardom and the Public (Media) Sphere 155 Della Robinson 17 Australian Literature in the University 163 Leigh Dale 18 An Australian Ethics of Reading? 171 Maggie Nolan SECTION E

Australian Literature and the World 179 19 News from Australia: Global Modernism Studies and the Case of Australian Modernism 181 Melinda J. Cooper 20 Hijabi-Bodies and Sartorial Strategies 193 Devaleena Das 21 Australian Literature in Asia: China and India 203 David Carter and Paul Sharrad 22 Facing East: Asia in Australian Literature David Walker

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SECTION F

Key Themes in Australian Writing 225 23 Turning the Inside Out: Interiority and Australian Fiction 227 Peter D. Mathews 24 Gendering Australian Literature 235 Alison Bartlett 25 ‘Silence Is My Habitat’: Judith Wright, Writing, and Deafness 243 Jessica White 26 Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Literature 254 Daniel Hourigan ix

Contents

27 Into the Urban Labyrinth: Helen Garner and the Drug Narrative 262 Nycole Prowse 28 ‘Something New at Hand’: Australian Literature and the Sacred 274 Lyn McCredden 29 Animal Presence: Problems and Potential in Recent Australian Fiction 282 Clare Archer-Lean 30 Landscape (after Mabo) 292 Tony Hughes-d’Aeth 31 ‘The Extraordinary Behind the Ordinary’: A Brief History of Australian Suburban Literature 304 Nathanael O’Reilly 32 Australian Literature and Everyday Life 314 Andrew McCann 33 Emblematic Spaces: Postcoloniality and the Region 324 Stephanie Green SECTION G

Genre in Australian Literary Studies 333 34 Twenty-First-Century Australian Poetry 335 Sarah Holland-Batt and Ella Jeffery 35 Life Writing and Conflict: Love Wins 344 Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas 36 Reluctant Wandering: New Mobilities in Contemporary Australian Travel Writing 353 Kate Cantrell 37 Australia’s Long Relationship with Romance 365 Tanya Dalziell 38 Magical Migrations: Australian Fairy Tale Traditions and Practices 374 Nike Sulway

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Contents

39 Shadows in Paradise: Australian Gothic 384 Gina Wisker 40 Australian Television and Literary Criticism 393 Susan Lever 41 Screen Adaptation and Australian Literature 401 Karina Aveyard Index 410

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 91 144

Tables 92 13.1 Australian Works of Literary Criticism 2000–2017 130

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CONTRIBUTORS

Clare Archer-Lean is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her research is focussed on analysis of animals and environment in various cultural artefacts, particularly fiction, and she has published in the areas of Australian literature, animal fictions, and human dimensions of wildlife management. Karina Aveyard is an Associate Professor at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Australian and New Zealand Cinema (2018) and The Lure of the Big Screen: Cinema in Rural Australia and the United Kingdom (2015) and coeditor of Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception (2013) and New Patterns in Global Television Formats (2016). Alison Bartlett teaches English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. She has published widely on Australian literature, feminist memory, and cultures of maternity. Her most recent book is Flirting in the Era of #MeToo (2019, with Rob Cover and Kyra Clarke). Nicholas Birns is the author most recently of The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space (2019). His other books include Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from the 1950s to the Early Twenty-First Century (2010) and Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead (2015). He is currently coediting The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel. Megan Brown  is an honorary fellow at the University of Wollongong. She researches the nineteenth-century colonial periodical press and has published a number of articles and chapters on Mary Fortune and Louisa Atkinson. With Lucy Sussex, she is currently cowriting a biography of Mary Fortune and her son George. Kate Cantrell  is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. Her research specialisation is Australian women’s travel writing and representations of female wandering. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in several literary magazines and journals, including Overland, Meanjin, and Island, among others. She writes regularly for Times Higher Education. Kylie Cardell is a Senior Lecturer in English at Flinders University. She is the author of Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary (2014), and editor of Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood xiii

Contributors

and Youth (2015, with Kate Douglas). She is an executive member for the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) Asia-Pacific, codirects the Flinders Life Narrative Research Group, and is the essays editor for Life Writing. Susan Carson is a Professor based in the School of Communication at the Queensland University of Technology. She has published in the field of Australian literary and cultural studies, chiefly in relation to Australian women’s writing, modernism, and interwar fiction. Her recent research focusses on cultural tourism in Australia and Indigenous tourism. David Carter  is Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland where he was formerly Director of the Australian Studies Centre and Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History. His study Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, 1840s-1940s, coauthored with Roger Osborne, appeared in 2018. Melinda J. Cooper researches and teaches in Australian literature, women’s fiction and modernism studies at the University of Sydney. Her work on Australian modernism has been published in Australian Literary Studies and Modernist Cultures. Melinda is currently completing a monograph on the work of Eleanor Dark. She is the Publicity Officer for the Australasian Modernist Studies Network (AMSN). Leigh Dale has published on Anglophone literary studies in Australia (The Enchantment of English, 2012), literary and academic representations of self-harm (Responses to Self Harm, 2015), and Australian and other literatures. She is currently chair of the judging panel for the Colin Roderick Award. Tanya Dalziell  works in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her latest book is Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics (2020). With Paul Genoni, she was the recipient of the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955–1964 (2018). Alexandra Dane researches contemporary book cultures, focussing on the relationship between gender, literary consecration, and the influence of formal and informal literary networks. She is the author of Gender and Prestige in Literature: Contemporary Australian Book Culture (2020). Devaleena Das is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth campus. With a PhD in Australian feminist literature, she has published four books and several articles and delivered talks and keynotes across geographical and cultural boundaries. She has received prestigious fellowships at universities in Australia and America. Her forthcoming monograph will be published by State University New York Press. Kate Douglas is a Professor at Flinders University. Her publications include Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (2010), and Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (2016, with Anna Poletti). She is the coeditor of Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (2019, with Ashley Barnwell). Jenny Fewster  is Deputy Chair of the Performing Arts Heritage Network of the Australian Museums and Galleries Association. In 2019 she was granted life membership of the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA) for her work on AusStage.

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Contributors

Sarah Galletly is an Adjunct Research Fellow at James Cook University ( JCU). As the Roderick Postdoctoral Research Fellow at JCU (2014–2018), she explored depictions of travel, geography, and colonial modernity in Australian print culture in the early twentieth century and coauthored The Transported Imagination (2018). Ken Gelder is a Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. His books include Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (1998, with Jane M. Jacobs), Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (2004), Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (2007), and After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007 (2009, with Paul Salzman). Jessica Gildersleeve is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. She is the author and editor of several books, including Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision (2017) and Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives (2017, with Richard Gehrmann). Stephanie Green lectures in writing, literature, and culture at Griffith University. Her recent research publications include studies of the gothic in the television series Penny Dreadful (Refractory) and Andrew McGahan’s novel, The White Earth (Queensland Review). She is also coeditor of Hospitality, Rape and Consent in Vampire Popular Culture (2017) and ‘As If’: Women in Genres of the Fantastic: Cross-Platform Entertainments and Transmedial Engagements (2019). Melinda Harvey is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University and currently holds the 2020 JUNCTURE Fellowship for Mid-Career and Established Critics at the Sydney Review of Books. She coedited the special section ‘Book Reviewing in Australia’ published in Australian Humanities Review in 2016 and convened the 2015 symposium Critical Matters: Book Reviewing Now in 2015. She has published as a book critic in Australia for over 15 years and is a current judge of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. With Julieanne Lamond, she has contributed to the Stella Count since 2014. Sarah Holland-Batt  is an Associate Professor at Queensland University of Technology, and the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. She is The Australian’s poetry columnist. Daniel Hourigan researches the interplay of psychoanalysis and law in contemporary literatures. His latest book Law and Enjoyment (2015) interrogates the psyche of the law in literature, cinema, and academia. He currently teaches English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is Associate Professor in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. His books include Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (2017), which won the Walter McRae Russell Prize for Australian literary scholarship. He was coeditor of Westerly from 2010 to 2015. Ella Jeffery is an award-winning poet and a lecturer in creative writing at Queensland University of Technology. Her debut collection of poems, Dead Bolt, is published by Puncher and Wattmann. Victoria Kuttainen is an Associate Professor of English and Writing at James Cook University. Her research interests include geography, mobility, print culture, colonialism, and vernacular modernity. She has published in Australia and internationally in venues ranging from JASAL to

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Contributors

modernism/modernity, and with Sarah Galletly and Susann Liebich in a series of chapters and articles that culminated in The Transported Imagination (2018). Julieanne Lamond is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Australian National University. She has published widely on the reception of Australian writers and Australian reading history. She is editor of the journal Australian Literary Studies and a current judge of the Patrick White Award. With Melinda Harvey, she has contributed to the Stella Count since 2014. Susan Lever’s book Creating Australian Television Drama: A Screenwriting History was published in April 2020. Some of her interviews with Australian television writers were filmed by the Australian Writers’ Foundation of the Australian Writers’ Guild and are available through the National Film and Sound Archive and the National Film Television and Radio School (https://www.nfsa. gov.au/latest/screenwriters-talk-about-their-craft). Eduardo Marks de Marques is an Associate Professor of Anglophone Literatures at the Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil. His doctoral research analysed the cultural and political impact of the Australian Bicentenary on history and fiction of the 1980s. Currently, he studies the rise of literary dystopias as a geo-techno-political phenomenon. Peter D. Mathews  is Professor of English Literature at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from Monash University, and has written extensively about British and Australian fiction. His first book, Lacan the Charlatan, was published in 2020. Andrew McCann  is a Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. His most recent books are Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain (2014) and Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique: Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity (2015). Lyn McCredden is Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University, specialising in Australian literature, and literature and the sacred. Her critical monographs include Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature (2009, with Bill Ashcroft and Frances Devlin-Glass) and The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred (2009). She is also the author of the poetry collection Wanting Only (2018). Janet McDonald  is a performative body theorist at the University of Southern Queensland, where she has taught emerging actors since 1999. She is the coeditor of Creative Communities: Regional Inclusion in the Arts (2015) and The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War (2019). Julian Meyrick  is Professor of Creative Arts at Griffith University. He is Artistic Counsel for the State Theatre Company of South Australia and director of over 40 award-winning theatre productions, including Angela’s Kitchen, which attracted the 2012 Helpmann for Best Australian Work. He has published histories of the Nimrod Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, the Paris Theatre, the Hunter Valley Theatre, and Anthill Theatre, and numerous pieces on Australian culture and cultural policy, including Australian Theatre after the New Wave: Policy, Subsidy and the Alternative Artist (2017). Maggie Nolan  is a Senior Lecturer in the Humanities and Deputy Head of the School of Arts at Australian Catholic University. Her current research focusses on reading and reception, xvi

Contributors

particularly the dynamics of literary sociality. She also has a long-standing research interest in questions of identity, race, and culture, especially as they relate to literary imposture. Nathanael O’Reilly  is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. His books include (Un)belonging (2020), Preparations for Departure (2017), Tim Winton: Critical Essays (with Lyn McCredden, 2014), and Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel (2012). Roger Osborne is a Lecturer in English and Writing at James Cook University. His research concentrates on Australian literature and British modernism seen through the lens of book history, magazine culture, and scholarly editing. He coauthored the book Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, 1840s–1940s (2018), and is completing a book-length study of Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life. Nycole Prowse teaches into the Literature programme at the University of the Sunshine Coast and is the founding Director of Peripheral Arts. She is a writer, educator, feminist scholar, and researcher with over 25 years’ experience in teaching at tertiary level and in the creation and production of creative and literary projects and festivals in urban and rural communities in Australia and internationally. She is the author of Heroin(e) Habits: Potential and Possibility in Female Drug Literature (2018). Francesca Rendle-Short is Associate Dean of Writing and Publishing in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. She is cofounder of non/fictionLab and codirector of WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange). Francesca is the author of two literary books, including Bite Your Tongue, and coeditor of three anthologies, including The Near and the Far, volumes 1 and 2. Della Robinson is affiliated with the University of Western Australia. Her doctoral thesis, Authors and Media Entertainment: Australian Literary Celebrity since the 1970s, investigates the phenomenon of literary media entertainment. Other studies in progress include the curational aspects of authorial star personas in relation to studies of Australian fandom. Paul Sharrad is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and Arts, University of Wollongong, where he taught postcolonial literatures. He edited New Literatures Review, coedited Volume 12 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English (2017), and has published books on Raja Rao, Albert Wendt, Indian English fiction, and Tom Keneally. Michelle J. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University. She is the author and editor of six books on children’s literature and Victorian literature, including From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840–1940 (2018). Emmett Stinson is a Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. He is the author of Satirising Modernism (2017) and Known Unknowns (2010), and coauthored Banning Islamic Books in Australia (2011). Nike Sulway is Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Southern Queensland. She is the author of several novels, including Dying in the First Person (2016) and Rupetta (2013). She is coeditor of Forgotten Lives: Recovering Lost Histories through Fact and Fiction (2018, with Donna Lee Brien and Dallas Baker). xvii

Contributors

Jean-François Vernay is the author of four academic books, among which is A Brief Take on the Australian Novel (2016). His new monograph entitled Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness and his edited volume, The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities: Conversations Between Neurocognitive Research and Australian Literature, will both be published in 2021. David Walker is Emeritus Professor at Deakin University and Honorary Professorial Fellow of the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. His publications on Australian representations of Asia include: Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region (2019), Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850 to 1939 (1999) and Australia’s Asia (2012). He was the inaugural BHP Chair of Australia Studies at Peking University, 2013–2016. Rachael Weaver is a Senior Research Associate in English at the University of Melbourne. Her books include The Criminal of the Century (2006), and with Ken Gelder, Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy (2017) and The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt (2020). Jessica White  is the author of A Curious Intimacy (2007) and Entitlement (2012), and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud (2019). Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared widely in Australian and international literary journals and she has won awards, funding, and residencies. Gina Wisker teaches and researches in Gothic, postcolonial and women’s writing, postgraduate study supervision, and academic writing. Her works include The Postgraduate Research Handbook (2001, 2008), Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (2007), Horror Fiction: An Introduction (2005), and Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction (2016).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the School of Humanities and Communication as well as the Centre for Heritage and Culture at the University of Southern Queensland for their research support. My thanks, too, to Chris Lee and Kate Cantrell for their assistance and insightful conversation at various stages of this project, and to Ralph Kimber for compiling the index. Michelle Salyga and Bryony Reece at Routledge were unfailingly responsive and dedicated to the book. This book would not have been possible without the enthusiasm and support of the researchers who make up the field of Australian literary criticism, and to whom I am also grateful. Finally, to Adam, Harry and Sam, who remind me every day how much books sustain and nourish us.

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INTRODUCTION Australian Literature, Companionship, and Viral Responsibility Jessica Gildersleeve These are the times we must think; these are the times of urgencies that need stories. (Haraway 37) In 2016, American poet Maggie Smith’s ‘Good Bones’ went viral after she published the work online. ‘The world is at least / fifty percent terrible, … / though I keep this from my children’ (lines 5–7), the poem asserts.1 But like a ‘realtor’ attempting to sell a derelict home (line 14), the parent must emphasise the world’s ‘good bones: This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful’ (lines 16–17). Critically, in ‘realtor’ we hear the echo of ‘writer,’ so that Smith’s poem comments not only on the delusion of perpetual improvement and progression one generation must ‘sell’ to another, but on the way in which the writer, too, sells us a vision of the world. Indeed, as the circulation of ‘Good Bones’ attests, literature is catching, viral: it has the capacity to influence and change our very being. Smith’s poem was written as a response to its precise historical context – in the same year that Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States and the people of Great Britain narrowly voted to leave the European Union, events which signify something of the global turmoil of recent years. Now, again, ‘Good Bones’ reveals itself to be ‘something of a societal anxiety barometer’ (Krug) as in early 2020 it continues to be circulated online amidst the general anxiety caused by the pandemic spread of the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19): ‘I can tell something bad is happening in the world when my poem is surging,’ Smith notes in a recent interview (qtd in Krug). Smith’s ‘Good Bones,’ then, is a work which responds to Donna Haraway’s ‘times of urgencies.’ To ‘think,’ for Smith’s reader, is to see through the realtor’s (writer’s) chatter but, nevertheless, to agree that we can ‘make this place beautiful’ if we accept, first of all, that this is a critical responsibility we must shoulder. I have begun this introduction with reference to literature and history of other nations, of the world. This is intentional, because in the transnational exchanges of a global society, Australia and its literature and history cannot be separated from those contexts and influences. Indeed, as I recently argued in a review of the latest novel by one of Australia’s greatest living writers, Christos Tsiolkas, for a practitioner of so-called Australian literature to write about another context can be seen to reposition their other work ‘as something more like world literature, stories which consider not only Australia on its own terms but the nation’s place in the world’ (Gildersleeve, ‘Letter to the Australians’ 194). Although earlier literary companions have noted the need, at the time of their own publication, to relinquish Australian literature from the binary definitions of its relations to Great Britain, in particular (see, for example, Hergenhan; Pierce), if Australian literature is only ever considered on its own terms, it will continue to be marginalised in the arena of world literature. To understand Australia and Australian literature now, that is, is to understand 1

Jessica Gildersleeve

the world now, and vice versa – the two inextricably interact, as the section of this book on Australian Literature and the World makes especially clear. At the moment, nothing makes this more apparent than the ultimate consequence of globalisation currently dominating our daily lives – the coronavirus pandemic. It may well be that this particular moment in history has been consigned to the coffers of memory as quickly as it arose in a marketplace in Wuhan. But at the time of writing, the world is currently in the grip of a pan(dem)ic. Travel bans, border closure within and across nations, racial profiling, and selfish hoarding point to cultural attitudes bred by neoliberal capitalism and xenophobia. As evident in empty supermarket shelves and in the refusal of many to adopt mandated social distancing measures, there is little egalitarian mateship or care for the other – only accusation, isolation, and fear, met with desperate pleas for community and support. Indeed, as Tsiolkas has pointed out, this virus has ‘altered’ the ‘very notion [of ] home,’ our concept of a site of safety and respite in both a personal and a national sense, and it has also disrupted those global contexts in which that home is situated. As Tsiolkas puts it: … there is another canonical ideal of liberalism that has also been demolished by the recent weeks, and that is the belief in open borders. While we waited to get out of Europe, country after country closed itself off from the rest of the world. In this sense, the virus and its consequences have validated the conservative voices that defend the nation state. It is not transglobal entities that are doing the work of looking after communities. It is the nation state. Were so many of us wrong? Were we shouting over people when maybe we should have been listening? Had we assumed racism and xenophobia whenever we heard an argument that challenged our beliefs? Had we forsaken questioning for certainty? And if so, what does that mean for the fiction we’ve been writing and the arguments we have been mounting? Tsiolkas thus emphasises not only the desire – or requirement – for travellers to return to the safety of their home and the medical resources to which it (one hopes) entitles them, but the virus’s reconstruction of the boundary between home and not-home, thereby working to erase the significance of those transnational exchanges of which Australian literature had worked so hard to become a part. This is the context in which the authors collected here have made our final preparations for this volume. This is a highly idiosyncratic historical moment, but in recognising its influence I seek to encapsulate the sense in which a collection like this one will always be of its moment, even when those themes recur. For instance, in 1988, the year of Australia’s bicentenary and a year of tension and celebration, Laurie Hergenhan published his The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. The collection exhibits its cultural moment at both the height of postmodernity and Australia’s assertion of an independent identity, as Hergenhan declares the need for a ‘new’ volume as ‘Australian works have generally remained unadventurous and slow to change in their approaches to writing literary history’ (xi). His collection thus emphasises the necessity to break away from European models of thought as well as the intersections of competing histories and their influences on Australian literary texts. Several other companions (Webby; Callahan; Birns) have acknowledged a contemporary focus. Elizabeth Webby’s The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000) affirms a ‘culturally materialist perspective’ (5) and offers a thorough historicisation not only of Australian literature but of its literary criticism as well. However, by the time David Callahan’s Contemporary Issues in Australian Literature appeared in 2002, that world had irrevocably changed following the globe-shattering events of September 11, 2001. Callahan’s collection is thus shadowed by a sense of the insecurity of the humanities and a series of self-conscious reflections on the field of Australian literature; ultimately, he suggests, literature might be an antidote to the ‘injuries of excess’ (14). Callahan’s is a book which has entered, it might be said, a world in mourning. This 2

Introduction

overwhelming grief might explain Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer’s observation in their 2007 collection, A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900, that interest in Australian literature stalled in 2006 (2). To trigger a resurgence of study in the field they stress the importance of celebrating a ‘heterogeneity’ of approaches (10) that avoid the turgid binaries of tradition versus experiment or nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. Birns makes a similar point in Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead (2015). Here he avows that Australian literature’s very plurality is the source of its resilience (x). The later works of this decade – Graham Huggan’s Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (2007), Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal’s Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader (2009), Peter Pierce’s The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009), and Nathanael O’Reilly’s Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature (2010) – thus primarily offer a postcolonial view of Australian literature, frequently positioning it within a context of the pluralities of world literature and arguing against any prospect of the field’s global marginalisation. As Huggan asserts, ‘even the most nationalistic of national literatures is always the product, at least in part, of a “transnational imaginary” that is persistently if inconsistently regulated by a wide variety of rapidly changing global cultural and economic flows’ (2). This attitude remains prominent in Australian literary companions: Nicholas Birns, Nicole Moore, and Sarah Shieff’s Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature (2017), the most recent collection of this type, follows in this vein, taking as its central argument the idea that Australia and New Zealand share similar concerns and a similar relationship with the rest of the world, even though they remain distinct from one another. Their collection maintains the emphasis on ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘plurality’ by focussing on different ways of reading, interpreting, and teaching Antipodean texts in Antipodean contexts. In writing this introduction I considered whether to mention the pandemic coronavirus at all, or to simply focus on the literary works discussed here and their significance for our understanding of Australian literary history, as a conventional introduction might do. However, as the above review of recent research into Australian literature indicates, like literary works themselves ‘companion’ collections such as this one are thus irrevocably a product of their particular cultural moment – they too are ‘something of a societal anxiety barometer.’ In fact, ‘companion’ comes from the Old French compaignon, literally meaning to ‘break bread’ with another – to share with another, to be with another. To be sure, a companion offers a hand to be held – here, as one seeks to understand the depth and breadth of Australian literature. But to refer to such collections as ‘companions’ is also a means of acknowledging the sense in which literature and its cultural commentary are our companion as we navigate the world. Literature and its criticism demonstrate the sense in which we ‘must think’ through and respond to the world. This argument is central to Donna Haraway’s conceptualisation of ‘response-ability’: What is it to surrender the capacity to think? These times called the Anthropocene are times of multispecies, including human, urgency: of great mass death and extinction; of onrushing disasters, whose unpredictable specificities are foolishly taken as unknowability itself; of refusing to know and to cultivate the capacity of response-ability; of refusing to be present in and to onrushing catastrophe in time; of unprecedented looking away … How can we think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse, when every fibre of our being is interlaced, even complicit, in the webs of processes that must somehow be engaged and repatterned? Recursively, whether we asked for it or not, the pattern is in our hands. The answer to the trust of the held-out hand: think we must. (35–36; original emphasis) Thought, for Haraway, is the solution to what Hannah Arendt calls ‘commonplace thoughtlessness’ (qtd in Haraway 36). Commonplace thoughtlessness, according to Arendt, is what produces the ‘banality of evil,’ which permits via a logic of ‘business as usual no matter what,’ atrocities like 3

Jessica Gildersleeve

the Holocaust (qtd in Haraway 36). To ‘surrender the capacity to think,’ then, might be to submit to a kind of virus of the ordinary – to catch thoughtlessness from others, thereby suppressing one’s own immunity to unethical behaviour. The counter to this, however, might be an attitude of what I want to call ‘viral responsibility.’ This, too, can be catching, primarily through our very companionship, the construction of community, the continuous, performative choice of compassion and responsibility, as Jacques Derrida makes clear: The aporia is the experience of responsibility. It is only by going through a set of contradictory injunctions, impossible choices, that we make a choice. If I know what I have to do, if I know in advance what has to be done, then there is no responsibility. For the responsible decision envisaged or taken, we have to go through pain and aporia, a situation in which I do not know what to do. I have to do this and this, and they do not go together. I have to face two incompatible injunctions, and that is what I have to do every day in every situation, ethical, political, or not. (qtd in Bernstein 403; original emphasis) We see this imperative in Australian literary criticism of this very moment – in, that is, the very practice of public thought. ‘Think we must; we must think,’ Haraway has it (40). Ethics have always been central to the study of Australian literature, Birns and McNeer point out (2), particularly as writers respond in various ways to the different challenges of their cultural contexts (Birns ix). The literary criticism collected in this volume demonstrates these companionable and compassionate modes of thought in which we respond rather than simply accept ‘the held-out hand.’ Perhaps this is one reason for the discipline’s insecurity: the way in which it disturbs and disrupts idealisations of Australian identity that depend on concepts of the battler, mateship, and masculinity. Australian literature always constitutes a challenge to the viral, to ‘commonplace thoughtlessness.’ The criticism it produces puts response-ability into practice.2 Indeed, in the early years of the twenty-first century, several scholars of Australian literature lamented the death of the field, citing the nation’s parochial sense of itself, Australian students’ lack of interest in their own literary history, and the lack of recognition on the world stage through major literary prizes as examples of the discipline’s slow march towards academic oblivion. Yet since then, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Tsiolkas, as heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the awarding of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize, have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This book emerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. It therefore not only considers works of Australian literature (including television, film, and theatre) on their own terms, but positions them in their critical and historical contexts and in their ethical and interactive locations in both the public and private spheres, analysing, too, the important work of literary prizes and reviews, book clubs, and different modes of adaptation. Australian literary studies are particularly striking for the way in which texts and writers function as objects in the literary field. Yet, often studies of a national literature take a simply chronological or historical view of the field. While such an approach does have merit in the ability to trace changes over time, to understand the interactions between literature and culture, and to consider factors of literary influence, this method also contains the danger of a simplistic approach to understanding the position of literature in its broader context, as well as the possibility of minimising or even removing other theoretical positions, particularly those that emphasise readership, since they tend to focus on the writer rather than on changing reading publics and practices. However, while a purely thematic or writer-focussed approach might be seen to be more innovative, 4

Introduction

often drawing less-obvious connections across the field and in that way helping us to understand the nuances of literary and structural change, it can threaten to put aside relevant historical and contextual discussions. This collection aims to draw on the advantages of both approaches by adopting a dual lens that focusses on both the historic and the thematic. In doing so, it proposes new ways of understanding literature of the past and thus of considering its significance for our ways of thinking in the present, while at the same time attending to critical themes and genres which occupy our contemporary mindsets. Further, rather than taking a generalist or neutral approach to the field, this collection seeks to make a critical intervention in the current state of play of Australian literary studies by focussing this combined thematic and historical approach on the function of literature in Australia today. Literary studies, and the humanities more broadly, are widely seen to be under attack in both Australian universities and the wider community, offered little in the way of funding and seen to be inferior to the study of STEM disciplines. Yet, in a twenty-first-century context that increasingly measures the viability and importance of research and its subjects according to impact and engagement, the omnipresence of literary texts in our daily lives suggests that they are as far-reaching and as deep-seated as any other object worthy of study. Indeed, it is precisely for the way in which literature encourages response (to the text) and responsibility (to the world) that it must be understood to have impact. It is those impacts and their significance with which this collection is primarily concerned. By addressing Australian literary studies in terms of the way in which they occur within a broader discursive framework, this collection seeks not only to provide an innovative approach to the study of the discipline, but also to suggest more generally the critical relationships between literature and its readership, as well as its use for our understanding of the cultural ethics of narrative. The study recognises Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces, and is produced by its context. This book thus works as a critical extension of current thinking about the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts as objects in the field. More particularly, then, it shows that Australian literature and literary criticism articulate these interactions through a discourse of response-ability. Each section of this book addresses a critical context, theme, genre, or approach to the field of Australian literary studies. The first three sections take a historical approach, considering some critical shifts and key time-bound themes and genres in the field. In each case, the focus is on understanding the past as a way of understanding the present. The collection then turns to a consideration of literature as a cultural object in its various manifestations, taking critical account of the interaction between literary texts and the world. Given the importance of transnational considerations in a globalised world, the following section considers Australian literature in a global context, with a particular focus on the Asian connections which are vital for our positioning of Australia today. The final two sections of essays take up points of critical focus and close reading of themes and genres, which have been particularly significant in the field, and which span or cross different historical contexts. The works included here inevitably draw on a familiar repertoire of Australian authors – Barbara Baynton, Henry Lawson, and A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, as well as the heavyweights of modern Australian literature, Tim Winton, Patrick White, and Alexis Wright, recur here most notably. But newer voices also emerge: the works of poet Lachlan Brown and novelist Michelle de Kretser are dealt with in a number of the essays included here. Similarly more familiar themes of Australian literature – particular bodies in particular places – are dealt with alongside more contemporary concerns, such as animals, disability, and transnational exchanges. Other concerns also persist, testifying to particular issues which dominate the field today: the establishment of the Stella Prize in 2013, the literary representation of hybrid identities, the ethics of interaction between human and non-human others, and Australian Indigenous conceptualisations of place and personhood are all themes which echo across a number of chapters. This last is a point 5

Jessica Gildersleeve

of note: in this collection, there is no separate chapter dealing with the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, a deliberate decision designed to prevent the separation of this as something other in Australian literary heritage. Instead, the majority of the chapters here attend to Australian Indigenous literature within a range of contexts and discourses. Finally, many of the chapters in this collection offer much-needed literature reviews of new areas of study, such as Asian-Australian literary relations, or new ways of understanding more traditional topics, such as gender and politics. Together these essays constitute a demonstration of Haraway’s response-ability, a rupture of the webs of complicity in ‘commonplace thoughtlessness,’ as well as Tsiolkas’s assertion that ‘it is inevitable that this ruin and this fracturing will be part of the writing and the art that is to come.’ The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature is thus a companion to thought, a contagion of viral responsibility. There is still much work to be done in exploring the multifarious nodes of imagination, which constitute the field of Australian literature. The present volume aims to capture the range of concerns of this precise and highly unusual moment in world history.

Note

Works Cited Bernstein, Richard J. ‘Derrida: The Aporia of Forgiveness?’ Constellations 13.3 (2006): 394–406. Birns, Nicholas. Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2015. Birns, Nicholas, and Rebecca McNeer, ed. A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. Birns, Nicholas, Nicole Moore, and Sarah Shieff, ed. Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature. New York: MLA, 2017. Callahan, David, ed. Contemporary Issues in Australian Literature. London: Frank Cass, 2002. Gildersleeve, Jessica. ‘Australian Literature and National Responsibility.’ Meanjin 1 Nov. 2019. . ———. ‘Letter to the Australians.’ Meanjin 17 Mar. 2020: 193–194. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016. Hergenhan, Laurie, gen. ed. The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1988. Huggan, Graham. Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Krug, Nora. ‘Maggie Smith and the Poem that Captured the Mood of a Tumultuous Year.’ Washington Post 23 Dec. 2016. . O’Reilly, Nathanael, ed. Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2010. Pierce, Peter, ed. The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Sarwal, Amit, and Reema Sarwal, ed. Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader. New Delhi: SSS, 2009. Smith, Maggie. ‘Good Bones.’ Waxwing 9, 2016. . Tsiolkas, Christos. ‘Were So Many of Us Wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the New Uncertainty.’ Sydney Morning Herald 3 Apr. 2020. . Webby, Elizabeth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

6

SECTION A

Literature in the Colony

1 EXPRESSING A NEW CIVILISATION Authorship, Publishing, and Reading in the 1890s Roger Osborne

By the close of the nineteenth century, Australian writers and critics generally agreed that ‘the writer’s purpose was, at least in part, to explore ethical and spiritual realities and ideals on behalf of the emerging and potentially wayward nation’ (Stewart 176). In this ‘emerging potential’ Geoffrey Serle perceives both hope and disappointment: ‘Naïve, confident optimism was reflected by writers and artists striving to express a new civilisation’ (60). While writers are recognised as the standard bearers of this ‘new civilisation,’ it should also be acknowledged that they were not working in solitude: ‘In turn-of-the-century Australia where editors and publishers were scarce, the few who did exist had disproportionate power over what sort of literature would be published, read and valued in society’ (Goldsworthy 105). In the years after 1 January 1901, when ideas of Australia began to emerge in the wake of Federation, two novels emerged from the 1890s to become touchstones for future discussions of the Australian literature and Australian literary culture: Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) and Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life (1903). These novels represent the final moments in a long chain of events that occurred within a complex and dynamic network of individuals and institutions, all claiming some stake, small or large, in the expression and critique of Australian identity at the turn of the twentieth century. By focussing on the process of literary production rather than the product, this chapter aims to draw further attention to the evidence of multiple authorship in Australia’s literary history in order to encourage new readings of the textual, material, and cultural lives of literary works. As touchstones for any discussion of ‘writers and artists striving to express a new civilisation’ at the turn of the twentieth century, Such is Life and My Brilliant Career provide ample evidence that the publication histories of literary works are ‘an index of broader social and cultural change’ (Eggert 179).

Publishing, Reading, and Authorship to 1900 Before his own work was published in 1903, Furphy acknowledged a kinship with Franklin’s first novel, drawing attention to the literary field in which they found themselves and their work positioned. In June 1902 he wrote to Kate Baker, ‘On reading [My Brilliant Career], I was positively startled by repeated coincidences with Such is Life. Identities of description which no plagiarist would have the front to venture on’ (Bushman and Bookworm 100). In February 1904, after obtaining her address from A.G. Stephens, then-editor of the Bulletin’s literary ‘Red Page,’ Furphy wrote to Franklin, congratulating her on her achievement and embracing her as an author similar to him in terms of origin and outlook: ‘I think our joint yet independent record ought to demonstrate the existence of a bush-born type somewhat different from the crude little 9

Roger Osborne

semi-savage of conventional Australian fiction’ (qtd in Barnes 339). In their work, both writers distanced themselves from the ‘semi-savage of conventional Australian fiction’ with critiques of the colonial romance prevalent in Australian fiction, and the presentation of their own work as ‘simply a yarn’ (Franklin 1) or the ‘less ornamental qualities of the chronicler’ rather than ‘the flowery pathway of the romancer’ (Furphy, Such is Life 6). Alongside Henry Lawson, Franklin and Furphy are frequently isolated as the most prominent writers of their time who ‘were more interested in depicting what “Australian” was from an insider’s point of view’ (Goldsworthy 105). But to do so, they were forced to position themselves within a print culture frequently less sympathetic to this perspective. In the late nineteenth century, a fledgling print culture delivered the work of Australian writers to Australian readers, with publishers keeping one eye on Australian literature and another eye on the bottom line. The tight Australian bottom line meant that the majority of Australian novels were first published in Britain, returning in imperial livery to ‘Britain’s largest export market’ (Lyons 19). But many more newspapers and magazines also printed Australian poetry and fiction, taking Australian writing to homes, schools, news agencies and libraries across Australia. This extensive nineteenth-century print culture network had an impact on the way that professional, freelance, and amateur writers understood the opportunities to publish their own work and the readerships that were available to them as they attempted to ‘express a new civilisation.’ The tyranny of distance had little effect on Australia becoming Britain’s largest export market for books and periodicals. From the docks of the major Australian ports, British publications were quickly transported along road and rail routes to city, rural, and remote dwellings across Australia, bringing with them a connection to the home country that would remain strong well into the twentieth century. Australian publishers (and writers) competed with these imports for the attention of the Australian reader, frequently beaten by both form and content. As Robert Dixon asserts, ‘the dominance of the British cartel encouraged the local book trade to operate as importers and retailers, rather than as publishers committed to fostering new national literatures’ (225). This meant that the responsibility for publishing the work of Australian writers in the nineteenth century was more frequently taken up by newspapers and magazines. Throughout the nineteenth century many periodicals appeared and disappeared until a number of newspapers and magazines provided the mainstay for readers and writers of Australian literature. The contribution of periodicals to the fostering of Australian writers and writing in the nineteenth century cannot be underestimated. Katherine Bode has demonstrated that the serialisation of Australian novels is more significant than previous literary history has indicated, emphasising ‘the importance of local practices in shaping colonial literary culture’ (96). Periodicals such as the Australian Journal, the Sydney Mail, and the Australian Town and Country Journal were leaders in publishing Australian writers and writing. Such periodicals reached a considerable number of colonial readers, indicating that the readership of serialised Australian novels is much larger than previous scholarship suggests (99). Few periodicals had a greater impact on Australia’s ‘literary’ culture in the late nineteenth century than the Sydney Bulletin, which published the short stories and poetry of ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson, Steele Rudd, Edward Dyson, and Price Warung, consolidating its reputation as the ‘Bushman’s Bible’ for a large number of readers in both urban and regional centres (Webby, ‘Colonial Writers and Readers’ 55). Nevertheless, throughout the late nineteenth century, a diverse range of Australian writers and writing circulated widely in daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers and magazines, reaching a similarly diverse range of readers with regional, national, and colonial prejudices. The editors of these periodicals acted as gatekeepers, selecting the poetry and fiction they believed Australian readers wanted, or in the case of the Bulletin, what they thought Australian readers needed. It was through such avenues that the work of writers such as Rolf Boldrewood and Catherine Martin saw their work first published. In Martin’s case, The Silent Sea was serialised in the Evening Journal, the Melbourne Age and the 10

Authorship, Publishing, Reading in 1890s

Adelaide Observer before publication in book form (1892), and in Boldrewood’s case, Robbery Under Arms was serialised in the Sydney Mail and the Echo (1882–1883). In contrast to the large number of periodicals that published Australian writers and writing in the nineteenth century, only a small number of Australian book publishers made any significant contribution to the development of Australian literature. Well into the twentieth century, British firms were the most prominent publishers of Australian writers with Angus and Robertson in Sydney and George Robertson in Melbourne providing only limited options for local publication throughout the ‘boom’ years of the 1890s (Nile and Walker 3–18). With the Bulletin Newspaper Company, Angus and Robertson provided the only opportunity for ‘the anti-romantic styles and genres of such writers as Henry Lawson, Steele Rudd, Albert Dorrington and Joseph Furphy’ that British firms would not tolerate (Stewart 183). Publishers’ editors and critics such as Stephens consolidated their position as gatekeepers for Australian literary culture by providing commentary in spaces such as the Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’ and by acting as advocates for prospective authors seeking publication with the few local (and international) firms willing to publish Australian literature. In 1896, Stephens had established himself as one of Australia’s first literary agents. After publication in London, Sydney, or Melbourne, Australian books greeted their readers on the shelves of booksellers and libraries in cities, towns, and private homes. As with periodicals and book publishing, studies have shown that sales, loans, and discussion were slanted towards imported literature from Britain (Lyons, ‘Britain’s Largest Export’ 23; Webby, ‘Not Reading the Nation’ 310). The readership for Australian literature was small, validating the caution that local publishers exercised with untested authors, but still large enough for Angus and Robertson or the Bulletin Newspaper Company to take a gamble on a local author. With The Bulletin Reciter, The Bulletin Story Book and the ‘Bulletin Library’ of fiction and non-fiction, the Bulletin Newspaper Company was one of the few publishers to assert a genuine ‘list’ of Australian writers. But one of the main problems, which also extended into the twentieth century, was the lack of ‘serious critics,’ which meant that ‘there was no responsive public for Australian writing’ (Carter 267). And so, despite a boom of literary activity in the 1890s, Australian literature had limited impact beyond the small circles of writers, journalists, and critics who maintained the networks of Australian literary and print culture. To become an established author of Australian literature in the late nineteenth century required attention to the few platforms available for such work, and an acceptance that remuneration would be small or non-existent. Many local writers responded to encouragement such as this from J.F. Archibald: Every man can write at least one good book; every man with brains has at least one good story to tell; every man, with or without brains, moves in a different circle and knows things unknown to any other man … Mail your work to the Bulletin, which pays for accepted matter. (‘To Readers of “The Bulletin”’ 15) But few writers made a living in Australia, and even fewer achieved the financial rewards enjoyed by British and American writers. Payment for serial publication in Australia was a fraction of what was offered by British and American mass-market periodicals, and book publication in Australia was rarely profitable for Australian authors. Lawson famously encouraged Australian writers to remove themselves from their unprofitable literary culture: My advice to any young Australian writer whose talents have been recognised, would be to go steerage, stow away, swim and seek London, Yankeeland, or Timbuctoo – rather than stay in Australia till his genius turned to gall, or beer. Or failing this – and still in the interests of human nature and literature – to study elementary anatomy, especially as applies to the cranium, and then shoot himself carefully with the aid of a looking-glass. (Lawson, ‘“Pursuing Literature” in Australia’ 2) 11

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While Lawson can take some of the blame for poorly managing his life and career, his injunction carries weight in many print cultures where literary value is frequently tested by the columns of a ledger book. This is the literary and print culture in which Furphy and Franklin were positioned when they began writing and into which they cast their work when they were ready to be published. This was not an easy path for either of them. Despite their stable position in the Australian literary canon today, their initial entrance was never guaranteed, and the integrity of the work they submitted had few protections from external forces. The history of their work is entangled in the history of Australia’s emerging literary and print culture, the duration of which occurred within a larger national project that aimed to bring a new art and civilisation to the world.

Joseph Furphy and Such is Life Published by the Bulletin Newspaper Company in 1903, Furphy’s Such is Life is widely regarded as ‘a key work in Australian writing and in the development of Australian notions of culture and nationhood’ (Malouf xxi). Now recognised for its realistic depictions of the Riverina district and its critique of the discourse of colonial romance found in nineteenth-century writers such as Boldrewood and Henry Kingsley, it is also recognised for its innovative techniques. Such is Life ‘was at once a late experiment in realism and a very early anticipation of postmodern techniques of fragmentation, allusion, pastiche and authorial self-consciousness’ (Goldsworthy 108). The publication of Such is Life marks a moment where the voice of an enigmatic autodidact from the backblocks entered public consciousness. But this entrance only occurred after a long writing apprenticeship and a protracted engagement with the economics of book production and the arbiters of taste in the offices of the Bulletin Newspaper Company. When Furphy began writing Such is Life in 1892, he had been working as a mechanic in his brother’s Shepparton foundry for a decade. Nevertheless, his earlier experience as a bullock driver in the Riverina remained fresh in his mind, providing subject and setting for the work that would occupy him for the next ten years. Furphy was a classic autodidact, drawing on all the intellectual resources Shepparton could provide, including the books and periodicals of the nearby Mechanics’ Institute and the discussion to be had from a few like-minded colleagues and friends. During this time, his intellectual life played itself out in the skillion he had built beside his house: ‘With a table and bookcase, and a stretcher bed at one end, it was almost crowded with only one visitor’ (Barnes 143). In this ‘sanctum’ Furphy wrote Such is Life in response to the world he saw around him and the world he saw depicted in the books and magazines he encountered throughout his life. As a reader, writer, and published author he was immersed in the print culture of his time, albeit as an amateur in the business of book publishing. Furphy worked long hours at the foundry, but his leisure hours were reserved for the reading and writing that contributed to his self-education. As a bullock driver in the early 1880s he carried a volume of Shakespeare with him throughout the Riverina, a literary education matched only by the Bible reading fostered by his mother. When he arrived in Shepparton in 1883, he built on this foundation with a membership at the Mechanics’ Institute, which provided access to volumes of the Chambers Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica as well as a range of serious reading and light literature. As a long-serving member of the Institute’s Committee, Furphy would have engaged in discussion of the merits of Ouida, Miss Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, and likely made recommendations for book purchases. Furphy’s encyclopaedic knowledge was also filtered through popular socialist works such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891), and Laurence Gronlund’s Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), consolidating the Christian socialist messages that would be later expressed in his writing. As with many mechanics’ institutes, enthusiastic self-educators were not large in number, suggesting that Furphy presented 12

Authorship, Publishing, Reading in 1890s

a solitary figure in the Institute’s reading room. But among the books, newspapers, and magazines assembled for his community, Furphy established a point-of-view that took a unique position in relation to, or in conflict with, the many voices calling out to nineteenth-century readers from the printed page. Furphy’s sense of the world emerged at a time when the Bulletin vigorously promoted socialism and nationalism and welcomed contributions from readers from all walks of life. Banned from tables of some reading rooms, the editor of the Shepparton News came to its defence: If Young Australia reads the Bulletin it will read a little balderdash, and a few paragraphs which wantonly offend religious folk, but it will be brought face to face with the greatest problems of the day, and will gather what the ablest thinkers of England, Germany and the United States have to say concerning them. (qtd in Barnes 161) The public debate stirred up by such contributions energised Furphy’s thinking and spurred him to pick up the pen himself. Further encouragement came from the literary nationalism fostered in the pages of the Bulletin. Dyson and Paterson were early contributors and other names began to appear that would come to define a style of writing frequently associated with the 1890s. More than any other periodical to that point, the Bulletin was a national paper, appealing ‘not only to Sydney people, but … [also to] the preacher up at Thursday Island and the farmer in Victoria’ (162)  – and one particular mechanic in Shepparton. In the reading room of the Shepparton Mechanics’ Institute, Furphy imagined his audience among the network of readers and writers addressed by a variety of periodicals, but especially the Bulletin. Furphy’s first published work appeared in the Bulletin in 1889, beginning an association with the weekly newspaper that would last until he moved to Perth in 1905. These first publications were short paragraphs and correspondence, the type of content the Bulletin drew from across the country. But with a few acceptances came just as many rejections, one that might have signalled the direction Furphy was about to take: ‘Too long, thin, loose, disjointed, and sprawling. Sort of narrative that flies in 18 directions at once’ (194). This response was addressed to ‘Warrigal Jack’ in the correspondence columns on 26 September 1891, but Furphy had also received more direct responses from the editor, Archibald: ‘Can’t you send us some short, sharp paragraphs about people who ought to be celebrated, or some interesting bush reminiscences or short stories … a single simple episode treated at no greater length than a column’ (195). An essay, ‘The Teaching of Christ,’ published on 31 March 1894, provides a glimpse of the Christian socialism that he was folding into an early version of Such is Life, but this would be the last substantial contribution until the Bulletin began again to publish Furphy’s short fiction and prose in 1900. With Such is Life growing in front of him, Furphy was unable to ‘boil it down’ for Archibald, remaining an infrequent and relatively unknown Bulletin contributor for most of the 1890s – like so many other infrequent and relatively unknown contributors to Australian newspapers and magazines. Furphy built on this early productivity when he began writing the sketches that would grow and merge to become the first version of Such is Life, a lost manuscript completed sometime in 1895 (Bushman and Bookworm 24). Two years later Furphy wrote to Archibald, asking for advice about the most appropriate publishing firms to approach with a novel that he described as ‘temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian’ – ‘I am absolutely in the dark here, and have no other referee’ (28). Two months later, Furphy received the ‘greatest surprise’ of his life (36) when he received a reply from the Bulletin’s literary editor, Stephens, who flattered Furphy by saying Such is Life was ‘fitted to become an Australian classic, or semi-classic, since it embalms accurate representations of our character and customs, life and scenery, which, in such skilled and methodical forms, occur in no other book I know’ (qtd in Barnes 252). If Furphy wanted validation for years of devotion to his literary project, recognition from one of Australia’s premier literary critics must 13

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have been intensely satisfying. But such assessments, on their own, do not sell books, forcing Furphy to make a number of crucial decisions as he moved closer to the status of a published author. Acting on Stephens’s advice, Furphy revised and shortened the novel in the process of producing a new typescript version. This version was delivered in July 1898 and Furphy signed his first publishing contract on 15 November 1899.

Miles Franklin and My Brilliant Career During 1899, while the 56-year-old Furphy was waiting in Shepparton, Victoria, for news from the Bulletin Newspaper Company, 19-year-old Stella Franklin was revising the manuscript of her novel ‘My Brilliant (?) Career’ at Talbingo, a few miles from Goulburn, New South Wales. Because of its subversion of the conventions used by other nineteenth-century women writers, Franklin’s My Brilliant Career is now regarded as a ‘feminist intervention into the nationalist tradition in the literature of the 1890s’ (Modjeska 34), but its path to publication was as fraught with difficulties as Furphy’s Such is Life. Begun in September 1898, the first version of the novel was completed in March the following year and, on 30 March 1899, Franklin sent the manuscript to Angus and Robertson in Sydney. This version was promptly rejected. Later in the year, she wrote to A.G. Stephens asking for advice, but his request for payment proved too much of a barrier and the slim chance that early versions of Such is Life and My Brilliant Career would find themselves together on Stephens’s desk never occurred. Like Furphy, Miles Franklin was a ‘bush intellectual’ (‘Miles Franklin: Bush Intellectual’) who acted on an impulse to write and reached out to the central nodes of Australian print culture; her education combined with her observations of family and community life in rural New South Wales to inform the creative aspects of her life. Her childhood education on the isolated Brindabella station drew on the contents of the station library, which, like many such stations, included a variety of newspapers to accompany more practical items such as dictionaries, handbooks, reference books, and gazetteers. The Bulletin was not likely among the reading material. Franklin later remembered, ‘Tho’ it didn’t rear me I always call myself a near relation of “The Bulletin”’ (qtd in Barnes 334). The library also held a variety of Bibles, including Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, and children’s books such as Aesop’s Fables and a Picture Alphabet of Birds. Formal education was conducted on the station veranda by a resident tutor who encouraged her juvenile literary aspirations, which would expand in the public school system when the Franklins moved to Talbingo. The schoolhouse exposed her to a broader world and a wider variety of books than those held in the station library, especially the novels of Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Daphne Du Maurier, and George Moore, and other nineteenth-century classics such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Newspapers remained important to the young Franklin’s sense of self and community, particularly Goulburn’s Penny Post, which kept her father’s radical circles informed about socialist politics. And, after reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) during a short term as a governess in 1897, her literary aspirations were sealed and she turned her attention to writing. Encouraged by her tutor, teachers, and other mentors, Franklin looked to the newspaper press as the most logical outlet for her early writing. Her first published writing appeared in the Penny Post in 1896, but most of her writing during these years was unpublished. This included a novel and several short stories, the former a long melodramatic tale entitled Lord Dunleve’s Ward and set in England and the continent. Of historical interest only, the novel is important for the relationship that was formed with Penny Post editor Thomas Hebblewhite who provided constructive feedback, recommended reading, and encouragement: ‘I wrote to the young aspirant and … encouraged her to write the things she knew best, the life she understood, and the scenes and 14

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people that were familiar to her’ (qtd in Roe, Stella Miles Franklin 45). A few years after reading this first clumsy attempt at a novel, he was one of the first to see the results of his recommendations. After Angus and Robertson’s swift rejection in March 1899, Franklin had sent the manuscript to Archibald at the Bulletin. Acting on some encouragement from the Bulletin’s Alex Montgomery, she revised the manuscript before sending it to Hebblewhite in July 1899. Hebblewhite responded favourably by suggesting revisions, offering to send the manuscript to his literary friends in Sydney, and writing to the British publisher Chapman. After conducting this final round of revision, Franklin wrote to Lawson, asking his advice on editors and publishers and requesting that he cast his eye over her yarn: ‘My trouble is that I have lived such a secluded life in the bush that I am unacquainted with any literary people of note and am too hard up to incur the expense of travelling to Sydney to interview a publisher’ (qtd in Barnes 335). Lawson responded with enthusiasm, offering to recommend the story to his publisher George Robertson, not aware that it had already been rejected once before. But Robertson was not given a chance to reject or accept My Brilliant Career: Franklin had signed over power of attorney to Lawson. Soon after his arrival in England in search of opportunities for himself, Lawson put My Brilliant Career in front of his British publisher Blackwood and the manuscript was duly accepted – but not without editorial intervention. Acting on an agreement between the publisher, literary agent James Pinker and himself, Lawson and his friend Arthur Macquarie revised the manuscript: ‘certain passages that the publisher thought would prejudice readers were removed or toned down’ (Roe 64). As Jill Roe surmises, ‘My Brilliant Career is an angry book, and well-brought-up young women were still not supposed to express anger’ (73), a condition that influenced the interventions of her male editors. Although it is unlikely that the Bulletin Newspaper Company would have published My Brilliant Career, Stephens regretted that Blackwood had ‘cut out the plums,’ but still pronounced it ‘the very first Australian novel to be published’ (qtd in Roe 73).

Furphy Follows Suit During the same period when he was regretting cuts made to Franklin’s book, Stephens oversaw a large-scale revision of Furphy’s Such is Life after two years of inaction. In 1897, upon receipt of Furphy’s manuscript, Stephens had given Furphy several options to think about, including London publication. Furphy rejected English publication, responding ‘Aut Australia aut nihil’ (Bushman and Bookworm 30), and resisted Stephens’s other suggestions of division or revision for several years until publication depended on his acquiescence. In 1901, responding to a face-to-face explanation of the financial risks and the suggestion that a shorter book would be ‘perfect,’ Furphy exclaimed, ‘I’ll shorten the beggar down to any size you like; and trust me to serve up the scraps in some other form’ (64). Furphy had looked over his seven-chapter novel and decided that the only option was to substitute a newly written short chapter for the long Chapter 5, ‘thus disposing of about 100 pages, which will serve as a nucleus for future fabrication’ (62). He followed suit with the second chapter. Ultimately, Furphy’s revision changed the book’s ‘centre of gravity,’ leaving a version in the typescript that ‘was more concerned with the relationships of men and women, and far more concerned with the notions of art, artifice, realism, and romance’ (Croft 61). Furphy had acquiesced to the demands of the publisher, but not without some regret and discomfort: ‘I find this job too much like pulling down a house and rebuilding a skillion’ (Bushman and Bookworm 65). Like Franklin, Furphy maintained a reserved attitude to the version of the work that emerged from the processes of literary production. After a brief correspondence, Furphy met Franklin in Melbourne in 1904, enabling them to personally reflect on the trials of authorship in Australia. The two books that emerged from the processes of literary production incorporate the interventions of others in visible and invisible features. Lawson not only secured publication for My Brilliant Career through a personal introduction 15

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to British print culture and his editorial intervention, but provided an authoritative male voice to accompany the voice of ‘the little bush girl’ into the world: ‘the book is true to Australia – the truest I ever read’ (‘Preface’ xv). Indirectly crafting a portrait of Furphy, Lawson speaks to the reader of this English edition of My Brilliant Career about ‘the country I come from,’ where every second sun-burnt bushman is a sympathetic humourist, with the sadness of the bush deep in his eyes and a brave grin for the worst of times, and where every third bushman is a poet, with a big heart that keeps his pockets empty. (xvi) As a self-acknowledged ‘bushman and bookworm,’ Furphy was ushered through Australian print culture by Stephens and the Bulletin Newspaper Company, producing a version of Such is Life very different to the version for which he signed a contract in 1899, a version that Stephens had welcomed as ‘fitted to become an Australian classic, or semi-classic.’ No matter how isolated the ‘[n] aïve, confident optimism … reflected by writers and artists striving to express a new civilisation,’ collaborations such as Furphy’s Such is Life and Franklin’s My Brilliant Career deserve more critical attention. Although both were published authors, Furphy and Franklin did not fit comfortably within the literary circles of Sydney or Melbourne. By 1906, Furphy was living in Perth and Franklin was living in Chicago. But the books produced in their name mark the final moment in a long process of conception, composition, revision, editing, printing, and binding within a dynamic network of nineteenth-century print culture.

Works Cited Barnes, John. The Order of Things: A Life of Joseph Furphy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Bode, Katherine. ‘“Sidelines” and Trade Lines: Publishing the Australian Novel, 1860–1899.’ Book History 15.1 (2012): 93–122. Carter, David. ‘Critics, Writers, Intellectuals: Australian Literature and its Criticism.’ Webby, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. 258–293. Croft, Julian. The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins: A Study of the Works of Joseph Furphy. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1991. Dixon, Robert. ‘Australian Fiction and the World Republic of Letters, 1890–1950.’ The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Ed. Peter Pierce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 223–254. Eggert, Paul. The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History. Cambridge: ­Cambridge UP, 2019. Franklin, Miles. My Brilliant Career. 1901. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2012. Furphy, Joseph. Bushman and Bookworm: Letters of Joseph Furphy [‘Tom Collins’]. Ed. John Barnes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. ———. Such is Life. 1903. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2013. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. ‘Fiction from 1900 to 1970.’ Webby, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. 105–133. Lawson, Henry. ‘“Pursuing Literature” in Australia.’ Bulletin 21 Jan. 1899: 2. ———. ‘Preface.’ Franklin, My Brilliant Career. xv–xvi. Lyons, Martyn. ‘Bush Readers, Factory Readers, Home Readers – Expanding the Australian Reading Public, c. 1890–1930.’ Publishing Studies 5 (1997): 17–23. ———. ‘Britain’s Largest Export Market.’ Lyons and Arnold, A History of the Book in Australia. 19–26. Lyons, Martyn, and John Arnold, ed. A History of the Book in Australia, 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001. Malouf, David. ‘Introduction.’ Furphy, Such is Life. vii–xxi. Modjeska, Drusilla. Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers, 1925–1945. Sydney, NSW: Sirius, 1981. Nile, Richard, and David Walker. ‘The “Paternoster Row Machine” and the Australian Book Trade, 1890–1945.’ Lyons and Arnold, A History of the Book in Australia. 3–18. Roe, Jill. ‘Miles Franklin: Bush Intellectual.’ NSW Premier’s History Awards Address. Ministry for the Arts. Sydney, 2004. ———. Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography. London: Fourth Estate, 2008.

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Authorship, Publishing, Reading in 1890s Serle, Geoffrey. From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia, 1788–1972. Melbourne, VIC: Heinemann, 1973. Stewart, Ken. ‘Journalism and the World of the Writer: The Production of Australian Literature, 1855–1915.’ Australian Literary Studies 13.4 (1988): 174–193. ‘To Readers of “The Bulletin.”’ Bulletin 16 Dec. 1893: 15. Webby, Elizabeth. ‘Colonial Writers and Readers.’ Webby, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. 50–73. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. ———. ‘Not Reading the Nation: Australian Readers of the 1890s.’ Australian Literary Studies 22.3 (2006): 308–318.

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2 THE REDEMPTION OF THE LARRIKIN AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Michelle J. Smith

As the population of the Australian colonies grew in the late nineteenth century, the major cities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane developed and expanded. Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver observe in their study of colonial Australian fiction that the development of the colonial metropole ‘usher[ed] in new character types and release[d] them into the city streets’ (107). With increasing urbanisation and new colonial-born generations, young people looked to one another for a sense of community and identification. For inner-urban working-class boys, the larrikin subculture, with its own identifiable dress, language, and camaraderie built around a rough and ready form of masculinity, provided a sense of belonging. This chapter considers this makeshift youth ‘society’ in two radically different Australian novels, Ethel Turner’s The Little Larrikin (1896) and Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911). Both were published several decades after the emergence of the larrikin in the 1870s and after the real-world consternation and even alarm that the larrikin provoked. As a result, both – though in vastly different ways – present favourable and redeeming depictions of larrikin figures, one a small middle-class boy who has pretensions to becoming a larrikin, and the other, an orphaned ‘hunchback’ who gradually builds his own fortune and progressively leaves behind the pull of the ‘push,’ as gangs of larrikins were known. While a great deal of Australian literary mythology surrounds the bushman and masculinity in rural settings, this chapter focusses on the larrikin in fiction around the turn of the twentieth century to examine how an idealised, nationally distinctive character type was imagined in the city, as part of an evolving urban Australian culture. Melissa Bellanta explains that the term ‘larrikin’ was adopted in the colonies in relation to urban young people ‘around 1870 because it evoked the qualities of “larking about,” “leariness” or “lairiness,”’ all of which meant ‘streetwise’ (ix). In the wake of the gold rushes of the 1850s, Melbourne was Australia’s largest city, with a high population of young people, and the location where the larrikin would first come to prominence (7). Sydney, where both of the novels discussed in this chapter are set, lagged in the emergence of larrikin pushes. Simon Sleight notes that in popular discussion the larrikin ‘could range in age from 6 to 28,’ but appears in the historical archive in his teens and early twenties ‘poised at a transitional moment between childhood and adult maturity’ (132). In a rapidly evolving ‘young’ country in terms of white settlement, young people, often the children of parents who had been born in Britain, saw themselves as ‘a new breed’ (Bellanta 8). These class-based subcultural differences and the crime and violence associated with the larrikin fuelled adult anxieties and moral panic throughout the 1870s and 1880s. However, with economic conditions from the 1890s halting the growth of colonial cities and helping to curtail the visibility of larrikinism, in a literary sense attention shifted to the building of narratives of national pride, and to do so the larrikin ‘needed to be redeemed, softened, and changed’ (Sleight 167). 18

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While the larrikin once symbolised the violence of the working class in its most threatening and sinister guise, the term now connotes a ‘lovable’ and harmless figure that speaks to the uniqueness of Australian masculinity. ‘Larrikin’ is applied to popular, but irreverent Australians such as actors Paul Hogan and Hugh Jackman, cricketer Shane Warne, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin. However, it was rare for colonial larrikins – in fiction or reality – to belong to the middle class in the first several decades of the term’s usage. Turner’s The Little Larrikin is perhaps one of the earliest attempts to extend the term to the middle classes and demonstrate a high degree of affection for the kind of roguish masculinity it represents. Nevertheless, the eponymous larrikin of the title is a boy of a mere six years old, ensuring there is a degree of humour in his fascination with, and attempts to emulate, the rough, working-class boys of the Canning Street push. Though Turner was well known as a writer for children, most enduringly for Seven Little Australians (1894), this novel was among a small number that might be read by both adults and children. Indeed, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art found that the emphasis on the ‘doings of the grown-up characters,’ particularly ‘various courtships among them,’ meant that the book was ‘hardly intended for “real children”: it is healthy and pretty enough for any one’ (‘Christmas Books’ 597). Brenda Niall notes that Turner’s dual audience novels often raised difficulties with publishers, as was the case with The Little Larrikin for Ward, Lock. Editor William Steele objected to a plot in which one of the boys in the eponymous larrikin’s family falls in love with a wealthy, married woman, and to ‘its being over-concerned with Sydney slum life and “the push”’ (22). While Turner removed the inappropriate infatuation, she refused to take up Steele’s suggestion that she stay for a time in England to ‘correct the free and easy, somewhat rowdy associations due to atmosphere, climate, environment, and the influences of The Bulletin’ that he detected in the manuscript (22). The Little Larrikin focusses on the male Carruthers siblings, Roger, Martin, and Clem, who belong to a middle-class family, with one a barrister and another a medical student. Their status is disrupted, however, when both parents die. The boys now live in Balcombe Street, situated in between the wealthy residents of Boyd Street and the slums of Canning Street, in which the gutters run with ‘malodorous water and small boys’ and on the footpaths ‘little girls and babies always’ (Turner 82). The youngest Carruthers child, Laurence or ‘Lol,’ is only six years old, but is drawn to the poorer children, situating himself as a ‘larrikin’ in his speech and behaviour. He has no maternal figure of the appropriate class background to rein in his cross-class identifications, as he is cared for one day per week by Eliza, a woman who otherwise works in the Canning Street greengrocer’s shop. Able to move between the three worlds, Lol makes acquaintance with a wealthy, bored woman, Marcia Barrett, in Boyd Street. Lol sweet-talks Marcia into making him an elaborate coat of the kind that the local push wears. Sleight explains that larrikin clothing was a source of pride and likely ‘an attempt to buy immediate status among their contemporaries, or a form of compensation against the “hidden injuries” of a lowly class position’ (150). Lol, however, seeks to own a similar coat to the one which he presents Marcia as a model (complete with ‘swallow-tails and silk-faced revers’ and ‘innumerable small dress buttons’) in order to belong with his poor friends. His plan is to wear the coat to an upcoming picnic, as such fancy garments are reserved for special events and are not worn ‘when they have fights or ordinary things’ (Turner 193). Lol’s age makes him young for a ‘larrikin,’ particularly given Turner’s framing of the poor as largely intolerant of, and burdened by, young people. Compounding the repeated mention of the almost plague-like proportion of children left alone on Canning Street, is the explanation that Lol himself is only tolerated among the poorer residents because of his class position. His eventual attendance at the picnic (a celebratory event following a wedding) is predicated on his connection with Eliza, who is related to the bride, as otherwise children are ‘necessary evils to be pushed aside, left behind and forgotten when chance offered’ (274). It is not only Eliza’s connection that grants him an invitation, however, as he has acquired ‘a certain standing of his own’ among the 19

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Canning Street residents as a middle-class child ‘that the boldest of their own small dwellers had been powerless to gain’ (274). The moral panic about larrikins in the 1870s and 1880s framed working-class young men as troublemakers who indulged in public nuisance for entertainment. John Freeman’s Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life (1888), for example, describes the ‘full-blown larrikin, hang-dog in look and careless in attire’ as attending the theatre ‘with no other apparent object than to air his filthy language, and create as much uproar as possible’ (77). As part of the literary redemption of the larrikin, Turner situates them within an empathetic critique of economic and social inequality. Lol’s older brother, Clem (or Ruffy) has been unable to find work and is tired of poverty’s implications for his own life as a teenage boy even though his situation is not as grim as that of the residents of Canning Street. In his lament about half of the population needing to ‘work like horses and die like unsatisfied dogs’ for the benefit of the wealthy, he declares that ‘There oughtn’ to be a Boyd’s Road and a Canning Street; it all ought to be Balcombe Street,’ so that everyone might be ‘respectably comfortable’ (Turner 163). Indeed, it is access to work and an income that prompts the greatest example of inter-class conflict near the conclusion of the novel when the push disrupts the gasfitters’ picnic. It is sparked because three young men in the Canning Street push had applied for plumbing work, but were all unsuccessful because ‘three respectable fellows belonging to no “push” at all had been preferred’ (273). While it is acknowledged that these men may have had further qualifications, the rejection of their labour is framed as an ‘injury,’ even if Turner does suggest that such attempts by Canning Street residents to engage in physical work were rare (273). The ‘anger’ of the push at large is directed at the ‘spoliation’ of the picnic, as they deliberately relocate their own picnic to the same location, establishing a situation in which Lol can no longer straddle both sides of the class divide (273). The larrikin boys empty pails of water onto picnicking ladies, potentially with the desire to create the ‘uproar’ that Freeman describes, and physical conflict with the gasfitters is provoked. Further groups of larrikins descend armed with sticks, stones, and shells, with the gasfitters angered by the harm wrought upon their women. Though he arrived with the larrikin contingent, Lol is angered at the treatment of the women who had been kind to him and ‘found himself in the strange position of fighting against his own party’ (284). His problematic class relationship with the larrikins is evident from the beginning of the picnic with respect to his dress. While Lol has used his connections with the wealthier part of town to source his elaborately made suit, he finds only nine or ten of the larrikins are dressed in the style ‘as done in London’ (275). Given the description of excessive decoration on Lol’s coat and pants, this reference to London seems to connect the larrikin clothing with that of Cockney costermongers who mockingly imitated wealthy society by sewing lines of pearl buttons on worn-out waist coats, caps, and trousers.1 There is an incongruity in middle-class Lol attempting to adopt this form of dress, and he gives half of his buttons to his young larrikin friend who is not able to afford any for his own clothing. Many of the poorer larrikins fashion their own ostentatious dress by wearing bright colours, and using flowers, feathers, and ribbons to decorate their hats. Lol places great import on the coat as a sign of his belonging because as a middle-class boy he does not know the actual deprivation and estrangement of the underclass and cannot be a larrikin in the most meaningful of ways; moreover, he cannot betray the middle-class morality he has been raised with given the dousing of the women at the picnic with water. The reference to London’s working classes is further drawn out in negative descriptions of the local women’s domestic capabilities, which also establish the bounds of Turner’s somewhat sympathetic depiction of poverty and redemption of the larrikin. The narrator observes that the mother of the bride at the larrikin wedding had provided a goose for the picnic that ‘cut as if it had come to Australia with Captain Cook,’ while the cakes brought by numerous women were ‘crumbled with careless packing’ and ‘all of confectioners’ manufacture’ (281). The sniping at the nature and presentation of the food by the women is barely contained in the description of the wedding cake as 20

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of ‘plaster-of-Paris construction’ making ‘a charming centre-piece on the cloth of newspapers’ (281). According to Turner, it is not a feature of working-class women more universally, as it is only ‘Australian woman of this class’ who fail to bake ‘home-made dainties’ (281). The lack of the redemption for the working-class larrikin girl or woman is perhaps also evident in the contrast made between the middle-class women who enter the conflict crying to ‘drag away husbands, brothers, lovers,’ while larrikin girls ran into the fray ‘and fought and shouted with the best of them’ (284). The very title of The Little Larrikin and its humorous portrayal of Lol as a cheeky yet lovable scamp indicates the novel’s redemptive work in relation to the larrikin. Nevertheless, Lol turning against his ‘own party’ during the picnic and the repeated narrative condemnations of working-class femininity – the care of children in particular – suggest that she may have been more focussed on depicting ‘a specifically Australian child’ in a favourable light than a youthful working-class Australian character type (Niall 102). Nevertheless, other writers of the Bulletin school more thoroughly attempted to champion the larrikin. Karenlee Thompson suggests that most adult Australian fiction and poetry in the early twentieth century ‘veiled’ the ‘cruel sordidness of the true larrikin’ with ‘a whitewash of sentimentality’ (177). One notable exception is Jonah, the first of only two novels published by Louis Stone (Betty Wayside was published in 1913). Thompson speculates that Jonah was not as popular as C.J. Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915) and The Moods of Ginger Mick (1916) ‘in part because of the realism of the Sydney larrikins’ (177). While Jonah ( Joseph Jones) and his mate Chook (Arthur Fowles) are likeable and empathetic in many respects, the novel sits adjacent to the canon of Australian fiction that cheerfully celebrates the working-class underdog. The novel begins on Sydney’s streets, the prime location for the larrikin’s offensive public ‘performance,’ as Rickard observes: …they occupied the footpaths, jostling and heckling respectable passers-by; their language was foul and they spat tobacco; they drank heavily and sometimes broke up hotel bars; they had no respect for police and, when in sufficient numbers, harassed and assaulted them. It was their brazenness in taking control of public spaces (as if they owned them!) which was galling to bourgeois society. (79) Jonah, who was abandoned by his parents to the streets as a child, is the leader of a push that gathers to watch a Salvation Army performance. The larrikins cause a disturbance with Chook pushing Jonah into one of the soldiers and into the ring, a verbal altercation and yells of derision ensue with the captain, which escalates to Jonah’s preparations for Chook to attack the Army drum with a broken bottle. The push does exhibit some fear of the police on their arrival however, with Chook soon listening ‘with unusual interest to the last hymn of the Army’ and Jonah looking ‘worried, as if he were struggling with a desire to join the Army and lead a pure life’ (Stone 5). The street represented the battleground ‘between respectable and non-respectable cultures,’ as the comic pretence of this scene represents (Crotty 177). Reflective of the importance of public space to their identity, larrikin pushes were often named in relation to their streets or suburbs, such as ‘The Fitzroy Forties,’ ‘The Napier Street Push,’ and ‘The Nicholson Street Push’ in Melbourne (Sleight 142). This ‘strong territorial affinity’ is evident in Jonah, in which Cardigan Street in Sydney’s inner west is the site of most of the push’s transgressions (Sleight 142). Jonah’s push – a group of 20–30 young men aged between 18 and 25 – gathers nightly at the corner of the street, underneath the veranda of a vacant shop ‘as men meet at their club’ ready to ‘guy the pedestrians’ and provoke fights (Stone 2). These fights are often against rival pushes and sometimes so brutal that victims are left for dead, but a strong internal ethical code means that loyalty is paramount and members of the push contribute to paying each other’s fines when in trouble with the police or ‘make it hot for the prosecutors’ (32). 21

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Jonah is an unlikely leader, but rendered sympathetically in his depiction as ‘a hunchback, with the uncanny look of the deformed’ (4). He is far from a ladies’ man with his large, thin aquiline nose in addition to the abnormality of his body. He ekes out enough to survive by working for bootmaker Hans Paasch, who initially took him on as an errand boy when he was 12. He falls in love with factory girl Ada Yabsley, who soon bears his child. When Ada returns to work, her mother, Mrs Yabsley, makes conscious attempts to lure Jonah away from the push and into her home. Jonah avoids the house ‘with an animal craft and suspicion,’ fearful that her home was ‘a trap’ that would bring him ‘under the law’ (15). Jonah is confronted by the threat of domestication when he spots a former push rival known for his ‘strength and audacity’ carrying a child and ‘not butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth’ (16). He fearfully turns over other examples in his mind of men who have married and been robbed ‘of all a man desired,’ leaving them ‘contented and happy’ (16). For Jonah, the push has been his family and the street his home, and the prospect of marriage represents the death (‘putting his neck in a noose’) of the life and identity he has fashioned for himself (16). Though Jonah is wary of marriage and fatherhood, they are the catalyst for his rejection of the push and the making of his fortune through establishing his own chain of shoe emporiums. The historical records suggest that many larrikins who appeared in court were employed as boot makers or shop assistants (Sleight 149). Ada works at Packard’s boot factory, while Jonah has limited earning potential in his ad hoc work as a bootmaker for Paasch and fears the regimentation of labour in the boot factory. Instead, he overcomes the problems of insecure and irregular work faced by many Cardigan Street residents by striking out on his own and starting his own shoe repair shop that soon forces Paasch out of business. The Cardigan Street residents are astonished by his transition from reputed push leader and former ‘street-arab, selling papers and sleeping in the gutter’ (Stone 140). The irony in the subsequent remark, focalised through the generic perspective of the residents – ‘Well, some people’s luck was marvellous’ – is that Jonah has had no luck at all and has struggled at every step of his financial and social elevation (140). If the larrikin is understood as a straightforward ‘model of hypermasculinity’ (Coad 12), then Jonah can be read as losing his identity as a larrikin once he withdraws from displays of aggression and becomes a doting father. However, Bellanta’s suggestion that unskilled young men were attracted to the ‘larrikin sensibility’ because of ‘the dream of an independent life’ invites an interpretation of Jonah as a model larrikin in his ability to achieve that independence and overcome the circumstances of his birth that situated him with little social or financial capital at the novel’s beginning (14). However, apart from the cheerful union of Chook and Pinkey, successful working-class couples are a possibility that is tragically refused. Chook’s ability to buy his own vegetable shop in which the pair can work and avoid the traps of the street is reliant on his winnings on a sweep ticket, suggesting that ‘luck’ is required for most people of the slums to survive as a family. Jonah’s attainment of independence through his tireless work does not lead to happiness in his home life. Ada’s father killed himself through drinking, repeating the established Cardigan Street pattern in which ‘love-matches were a failure’ (Stone 14). The decline of Jonah’s marriage with Ada and her descent into alcoholism and domestic neglect flips the gendered norm, but ensures the continued cycle of broken relationships. While Jonah’s exceptional character transforms his economic circumstances, and affords him love and involvement in the life of his child, it is also the reason why he cannot conclude the novel in a contented relationship. Though Ada has been exploited by other poor people, such as her neighbour’s housekeeper, Mrs Herring, who encourages her to drink to benefit from the free-flowing alcohol, Jonah cannot forgive the actions of his love interest Clara Grimes (his son Ray’s piano teacher) in hastening his wife’s demise. (Clara knowingly gives Ada money for more alcohol that precipitates her deathly fall down a flight of stairs.) Loyalty to Ada is a matter of class-based morality, just as Turner’s little larrikin, Lol, must act according to middle-class 22

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morality when compelled to make a choice between the two worlds he shuttles between. In Jonah, the down-at-heel on the streets have little, but will never betray a fellow Cardigan Street resident to police or an outsider. In a bitter argument with Ada, Jonah comments ‘when I married you I married Cardigan Street,’ referencing his inability to escape ‘the silly loafers’ he grew up with despite his success and new home; he is irrevocably tied to the slums so long as Ada is his wife (171). It is Jonah’s loyalty to Ada and Cardigan Street that means he cannot embrace the possibility of a happy life with Clara that he had previously desired. He never sees her again, instead perfunctorily marrying shop assistant Miss Giltinan because he needs help in raising the increasingly ‘unmanageable’ Ray (291). The moment that Jonah processes Clara’s role in his wife’s death, he is ‘crouching motionless on the end of the sofa, his head buried among the cushions, like a stricken animal’ (291). The animal metaphor that expressed Jonah’s larrikin fear of being contained by marriage returns in a way that indicates that elements of his wildness – forged through fending for himself on the streets as a child – are permanently embedded in Jonah regardless of his wealth and standing.2 The overtly stated social critique presented in The Little Larrikin is undercut by the novel’s frequent barbs about working-class women and their neglect of children and shirking of domestic responsibilities and the fact that the most positively represented ‘larrikin’ is a middle-class boy whose age and family background mean that he is no violent threat and will never know true poverty or abandonment. In contrast, in Jonah the ongoing resonance of life in the Sydney slums shapes Jonah’s emotions and impacts upon his relationships even when he has long left poverty behind. For those who were members of Jonah’s push, there are lifelong consequences of lawless gang life that range from jail for Waxy Collins and Joe Crutch for theft, and unending anxiety on the part of Pinkey and her mother that Chook would ‘tire of Pinkey’s apron-strings and return to the Push and the streets’ (248). While the old members of the push now sit in jail cells or, in the case of Jonah and Chook, run their own businesses, their younger ‘successors’ take their place under the corner veranda (201). There is a sense of inevitability to the shortness of childhood on Cardigan Street, the swift transition to maturity, and the grim reality of slum life. Mrs Yabsley remarks that mothering on the street is hard because childhood innocence is short-lived: ‘Yer girls are mothers before their bones are set, an’ yer sons are dodgin’ the p’liceman round the corner before they’re in long trousers’ (25). Large numbers of children play unsupervised in the streets and are beaten by their parents to return inside, disrupting ideals of childhood as safe and secure. Moreover, youth on Cardigan Street is animalistic and primitive with the children described as ‘swarming like rabbits’ and as chanting rhymes that pass between the generations ‘as savages preserve tribal rites’ (23). In this uncivilised realm, Stone depicts young men as having little choice but to find community, belonging, and loyalty among one another, extending an understanding of the impacts of class and intergenerational poverty in a way that Turner’s fiction cannot accommodate. Jonah transforms his life, but the wild part of his nature forged on the streets can never be erased. With Ada’s death, however, the ‘last link had snapped that bound him to Cardigan Street and the Push’ (287). Now that this link is severed, the importance Jonah places on privileging the ‘management’ of Ray suggests that his priority is to spare his son from the animalistic and neglectful childhoods that are the only ones possible for those living or raised on Cardigan Street. Both The Little Larrikin and Jonah can be viewed as part of the ‘rescue’ of the literary larrikin in their attempts to show the larrikin as endearing and distinctly Australian in the case of Turner and ground down by the cyclical nature of poverty in Stone (Sleight 169). While they are far from the subsequent celebrations of the larrikin in Dennis’s war-time poetry, the larrikins they depict are distinct from the figure who was the subject of moral panic throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Turner’s novel no doubt had less influence on subsequent hagiographical representations 23

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of the larrikin, given that it largely maintains class boundaries and stereotypes even though the middle-class Lol mimics aspects of larrikin social performance. While Jonah is in many respects disturbing in his violent larrikin guise, the combination of his rough-and-ready masculinity and disrespect for authority in his youth with his status as a self-made family man in the second half of the narrative prefigures many of the qualities that have become embedded in the popular usage of the term throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Notes



Works Cited Bellanta, Melissa. Larrikins: A History. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2012. ‘Christmas Books.’ Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 5 Dec. 1896: 596–597. Coad, David. Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities. Paris: Presses Universitaires De Valenciennes, 2002. Crotty, Martin. Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2001. Freeman, John. Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1888. Gelder, Ken, and Rachael Weaver. Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2017. Niall, Brenda. Seven Little Billabongs: The World of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 1979. Rickard, John. ‘Lovable Larrikins and Awful Ockers.’ Journal of Australian Studies 22.56 (1998): 78–85. Sleight, Simon. Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Stone, Louis. Jonah. 1911. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2013. Thompson, Karenlee. ‘The Australian Larrikin: C.J. Dennis’s [Un]sentimental Bloke.’ Antipodes 21.2 (2007): 177–183. Turner, Ethel. The Little Larrikin. London: Ward Lock, 1896.

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3 THE METROPOLIS OR THE BUSH? Megan Brown

‘The city or the bush’ is, as Graeme Davison suggests, one of ‘the great themes of Australian history’ (‘The Exodists’ 1), and a range of critical perspectives and historical analysis have been devoted to consideration of it.1 Recent scholars generally concur with the view that the dichotomy, which remains a staple of popular culture, is in many ways false. For example, the literary figures who are associated with the debate usually had connections with both country and city, moved between them, and wrote in and about both places. The binary approach also ignores those spaces that are neither, like country towns and suburbs – the places where most Australians live, and which are also central to the literary (see Rooney). The tenacity of the opposition between metropolis and rural therefore demands explanation: perhaps it is because ‘the bush’ remains primarily a place created by the imagination, its voices unheard except as quaint or comic detail. For in popular and literary representations the definitive element of ‘the bush’ is, counter-intuitively, not so much place as time: in the twentieth century and beyond ‘the bush’ is never modern, although this was not the case in the nineteenth century.2 While it was the masculine voices of writers such as Henry Lawson and A.B. Paterson that were used to create the literary representations with which we often identify, earlier female voices such as Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Rachel Henning, Mary Fortune, and Louisa Atkinson tell us of the connection and movement between the metropolis and the bush and acknowledge that attitudes towards one or both can change over time. One early scholar of Australian literature who was famously identified with the rural environment where she grew up, Judith Wright, argues that colonial writers represented Australia as a place both of ‘exile,’ and of ‘newness and freedom’ (xi). For some colonists, all of Australia was ‘the bush,’ a terrifying place to be escaped by returning home; in this sense, the invader’s country of origin remained ‘the metropolis.’ For others, the new place provided challenges they were willing to embrace. Fascinated by its flora and fauna, they studied, wrote about, drew, and photographed the natural world. Richard Waterhouse, in The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (2005), found that the colonial press represented a wide range of views of the bush in fiction and non-fiction, a range that was broadly reflective of the diverse backgrounds and opinions of its readers. By mid- century, two-thirds of these lived outside the metropolis, a ratio that would be reversed during the twentieth century. As the proportion of people living in cities increased and federation approached, the Bulletin magazine began an ideological crusade: under the banner ‘Australia for the Australian’ and then ‘Australia for the white man’ it promoted a nationalist agenda, lamenting the disappearance

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of opportunity that had been provided by living on the land. The weekly magazine published articles and fiction that fuelled the myth of a distinctive Australian ethos, male and egalitarian, that was being built on the archetype of the lone bushman whose masculinity and Australianness were created by his battle against the land. One notable exemplar of the Bulletin’s active role is in its publication in 1892 of poems by two of the colonial period’s most popular writers, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, on the theme of ‘Sydney or the Bush.’ In his poem ‘Borderland’ Lawson opens the debate with the line ‘I’m back from up the country – very sorry that I went’ (1) and goes on to describe the bush as a ‘Land where gaunt and haggard women live alone and work like men’ (33). Lawson, who had been born and spent his early life in the bush before moving to Sydney in his midteens, took the side of the metropolis. Paterson replied a fortnight later with ‘In Defence of the Bush,’ telling Lawson ‘You better stick to Sydney and make merry with the ‘push’/For the bush will never suit you, and you’ll never suit the bush’ (40). Other writers joined the fray, leading to a well-subscribed following of the good-humoured debate (see Paterson, ‘A Reply to Various Bards’). It is a measure of the complexity of even this most stereotypical and probably staged debate about the complete opposition of bush and city that, in the same issue of Paterson’s first reply, Lawson published perhaps the best-known and most sentimental of all paeons to life in the bush, his short story ‘The Drover’s Wife.’3 Paterson, too, had contributed a crucial element of the myth with his poems ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ (1889) and ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (1890), the latter about the chase of brumbies down a mountainside that, after spawning three films, a television series, and a musical, would help to make the wild horses of the Australian alpine region the focus of debate more than a century later (see Chan). Other writers who helped in the creation of an idealised image of the bush and its people were C.E.W. Bean, in his descriptions of Australian soldiers in the First World War ‘as [a] unique Australian type, utilitarian, egalitarian, pragmatic and anti-authoritarian’ (qtd in Waterhouse 192), and literary nationalist Vance Palmer, who claimed that the gold ‘diggers of the 1850s’ had ‘an ethos that centred on mateship, democracy and nationalism’ (193). Although Russel Ward sought to scrutinise what he termed The Australian Legend (1966), the title of his book served only to further ensconce the notion that ‘the real Australia’ is to be found ‘in the bush,’ a place where an authentic and distinctive ‘type’ is cultivated who can lay claim to embody ‘the truth’ about Australia and its people. As Lawson’s own story ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (among many others) demonstrates, however, ‘the bush’ was always home to a variety of people, whose voices can be heard in the vast body of writing that is constituted by the colonial periodical press. Periodicals – journals, magazines, and newspapers – were published in almost every town and city. They are the major source for Australian literary culture in the colonial period, and modern investigations are rewriting Australian literary history (see Bode). Very few colonial writers achieved book publication, which was expensive and usually came at a cost to the writer – it is believed the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon committed suicide in part at least over a debt he owed to the publishers Clarson and Massina in Melbourne for his second book of poetry (see Kramer). Other than the exceptional Louisa Lawson, who edited the feminist journal The Dawn, periodicals were usually curated by men but anyone could contribute to a periodical, and they did … in droves. Richard Waterhouse argues that there was no ‘dominant popular image of the Bush and its inhabitants’ over the century from 1813 to 1913. Instead, there is ‘a series of such images,’ ‘constantly changing and reforming as a result of transformations in rural and urban Australia,’ each affecting the other so that there was ‘a complex and ever-evolving interchange between urban and rural culture’ (193). This exchange, this diversity, and changes over time, however, are often lost. It is much easier to portray the bush as an unchanging place where only one kind of person lives, all 26

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‘“hardy pioneers,” sturdy members of the “Anglo-Saxon race,” united in their quest for progress, prosperity and a united nation.’ As Waterhouse goes on to observe, this simpler version …was also reflected in the reinterpretation of the European occupation of the interior as a peaceful process, with Aborigines [sic] becoming more or less invisible. Originally represented as fierce opponents of European occupation, and later in nostalgic terms as a ‘dying race,’ now they had virtually vanished from the European version of history. (192) Henry Reynolds and others have brought this more complex and conflictual history back into view (see Clark and Macintyre; Reynolds; Ryan et al.), while others have emphasised the significance of continuing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence (see Langton; Pascoe; Wright, Tracker). Their work brings to the fore the bitter and bloody confrontations that have been part of the history of ‘the bush.’ As this historiography suggests, while many voices of the bush have spoken, they have often not been heard, a point first raised at length in relation to women writers by Kay Schaffer. The four women to whom this chapter now turns wrote from and about the bush, in a range of genres; all were a significant presence in the periodical press. Two reveal the way their views about urban and bush environments changed over time; one recognised the value of Australian Indigenous cultures and people; the fourth worked determinedly to raise consciousness of the value of the native vegetation and animals. In a time when women’s lives, even in the Australian colonies, were supposed to have been circumscribed by the ‘Victorian Cult of True Womanhood,’ all four women defied stereotypes. This small sample necessarily leaves out the contributions of many, but does provide an alternative to the masculinist perspective exemplified in populist accounts of the Australian Legend. Eliza Hamilton Dunlop arrived in New South Wales in 1838. This was the year of the Myall Creek Massacre, in which 28 Australian Indigenous people were murdered and seven of around a dozen perpetrators subsequently arrested, tried, and executed. Dunlop went with her second husband, David Dunlop, and their four children to live in Wollombi, where David was the police magistrate and protector of Indigenous peoples. Her poem ‘The Aboriginal Mother’ was published in late 1838, at a moment when perpetrators of the massacre had been tried and shortly were to be hung, a time of fierce public debate about the crime and the punishment. Katie Hansord has argued that the poem (and its author) can be understood within global Anglophone a nti-slavery discourses, driven in part by literary works that use the powerful rhetoric of the maternal to inspire sympathy, by portraying the bond between mother and child as universal and powerful (4–6). In this respect, although apparently ‘isolated in the bush,’ Dunlop was part of a global feminist literary response to the violence perpetrated against Indigenous and enslaved people. When ‘The Aboriginal Mother’ was set to music in 1841 it was widely republished in colonial newspapers, at which time Dunlop was sneered at for attributing the capacity for poetic gifts to Aboriginal people (Anon), a criticism to which she responded defiantly (Letter). In 1848 the Sydney Herald, the paper that had made the initial comments and then offered an irritable postscript to her letter, now published Darkinjung language poetry, with transliterations by Dunlop.4 This is the first verse: Nung-Ngnun Nge a runba wonung bulkirra umbilianto bulwarra; Pital burra kultan wirripang buntoa. (‘Native Poetry’ 1–3)5

Dunlop then describes the singer of the verse, in terms that are identifiably European and Romantic: There is a god of Poesy, Wallatu, who composes music, and who, without temple, shrine, or statue, is as universally acknowledged as if his oracles were breathed by Belus or Osiris: he 27

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comes in dreams, and transports the individual to some sunny hill, where he is inspired with the supernatural gift. (3) The poem is then ‘translated and versified’ by Dunlop (3), leaving some nouns in the original language that are then translated in a separate vocabulary. The publication suggests strongly that Dunlop engaged directly with Australian Aboriginal people, recognising the value of their culture and knowledge, although she did not name the people or group from whom she had received or taken the poem. Rachel Henning was published in the Bulletin – but not until the 1950s. The daughter of a clergyman and eldest sister of four surviving siblings, Henning was born in England in 1826. When her brother and one sister decided to move to Australia for health reasons, she decided to join them before they had even disembarked, taking another sister with her. Her letters tell the remarkable tale of a woman who left a settled but uneventful life to travel across the world, offering a vibrant account of the joys and the tribulations of migration. Like many before and after her, she struggled with changes in weather, landscape, and society, but unlike many, Henning is able to articulate clearly the problems she experiences. Henning frames her homesickness in terms of her inability to reconcile herself with ‘the bush.’ She tells her sister Henrietta, the only sibling to remain in England, ‘I do not care enough about the Australian flowers to take much trouble with them.’ Reflecting on her diffidence, she writes I often wonder what can be the difference. I suppose it is the want of any pleasant associations connected with them. I often see very pretty flowers in the bush and just gather them to take a look at them, and then throw them away again without any further interest, while at Home every wildflower seemed like a friend to me. (26) Henning is raising profound questions about the role of memory, community, and narrative in making the everyday significant – or not. For, measured against the place she has known, she finds even good weather unsatisfactory: ‘Fine days here bring me no pleasure as they do in England: they are too hot and too numerous, and besides, you cannot enjoy them by taking nice walks – there are no walks to take’ (27). Having arrived in Australia in 1854, Henning returned to England in 1856. That was not, however, the end of the story: she found that she could no longer enjoy being a dependent, relying on the charity of her brother-in-law and becoming a live-in maiden aunt. She returned to Australia in 1861, and it seems that from the moment she arrived, her perspective had changed: I wish I could give you the least idea of the beauty of the scenery here. It was a lovely morning, and we wound along one side of the hill with a deep ravine on our right, and, on the other side of the ravine, a wall of rock that seemed to rise up to the sky with trees growing out of every crevice and the sun shining on the top, while all below was in black shade. I had forgotten how magnificent those Blue Mountains were. (66) ‘The bush,’ a place that had held no appeal, now provided freedom, and Henning could not get enough of it. When her brother moved to an outback Queensland property, she could not wait to join him. Despite the difficulties of the journey, she met the challenges with good cheer and optimism. We had to camp again in the rain, but it did not last very long, and we had a dry night. The camp was in the prettiest spot we have had on a sort of range chosen for its dry and stony properties, with mountains all round us, the mist rolling over them. (102) 28

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Even the colonial metropolis is easily surpassed by life in the countryside: this easy out-of-door life with the shady house and veranda in the heat of the day and the beautiful evenings to walk in is far pleasanter than the dull streets of Sydney, dusty or muddy, as is the case may be. (150) Mary Fortune likewise came to the Australian colonies in the 1850s, but her experience of life could not have been more different than that of Rachel Henning. While Henning may have bent the rules, Fortune threw out the rule book, in her personal life and in her writing. Like Dunlop, Fortune was originally from Ireland, joining her itinerant father on the Victorian goldfields via North America after escaping her Canadian husband with little more than her infant son in hand. In 1856 she gave birth to another son, father unknown (although the child shared his Canadian-born brother’s surname of Fortune), and then married a mounted trooper named Percy Rollo Brett. Henning may have shocked her family by marrying the station manager, but Fortune deserted her husband, gave birth to an illegitimate child, married bigamously, lost one son to the grave and the other to gaol, was alcoholic, and spent most of her life alone and penniless. Henning wrote intimate letters to family, while Fortune wrote stories, sketches, and serials to make her living. Without the means to leave the Australian colonies, she may have adjusted to the Australian bush more quickly than Henning, but they describe their love of the bush in similar terms. And for both, the further from the city the better. When Fortune first arrived in the colony of Victoria she had been engaged by an English women’s magazine to write about her goldfield experiences, in much the same way as Ellen Clacy had, although her project never came to fruition. She did, however, produce a six-episode memoir many years later, ‘Twenty-Six Years Ago,’ which she claimed was based on notes she had made at the time. She describes the horror with which she first viewed her Australian surroundings: I distinctly recollect how inferior and dirty the railway carriages and the wooden stations seemed to me, after coming from lands where art and science appeared to have perfected themselves in the production of such conveniences; and I more than distinctly remember the almost impassable condition of Elizabeth-street, and the team of bullocks that hopelessly tried to drag a laden dray out of the clinging mud in the centre of the street (if street it could be called, when only scattered houses, and a here and there visible kerb-stone, outlined a mass of glutinous clay). (Sept. 33) Her horror was compounded by her journey to the goldfields on a Cobb & Co. coach, a ‘terrible journey’ that she remembers as a ‘nightmare.’ (36) Yet, like Henning, Fortune came to experience ‘strange delight’ from turning her back on urban life and embracing the bush. Her description of her pleasure bears out Henning’s contention about the importance of sensory memory appreciation of place: To lounge on rugs under the canopy of pale heaven, broken only by the spreading branches of rustling trees; to see the gleaming of creek or dark water-hole in its denser shadows of bush and bank; to hear the bullock bells ‘tinkle tinkling,’ as the grateful beasts cropped the grass for acres around our temporary shelters; and listen to the sighing or rustle of leaves above us was a pleasant thing, and every puff of sweet night air brings remembrance to me still. (Feb. 339). Sensory appreciation turns to overload when Fortune turns to the goldfields: The noise was shocking, and toward evening deafening. Hammering, chopping, bellringing, band-playing, shouting, laughing, fighting, and singing were all represented horridly in the 29

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babel of a new rush, and one heard and saw as in a dream in which the dreamer’s identity is lost. (340) This observation reinforces Waterhouse’s view that colonial identity was changeable, a flux that Fortune describes poetically. Sleeping in the goldfields is an experience that enables her to ‘fall asleep and dream dreams that change as quickly as the forms in an unsteady kaleidoscope, and to awaken with a bewildered feeling that you are not yourself but have changed places with some other identity’ ( Jan. 280). It seems she is not alone: a digger tells her that at times he does not know himself, such that when he gets a glimpse of his reflection in a creek he ‘sometimes think[s] it must belong to some other man’ (Feb. 339). Fortune created probably the largest corpus of any colonial writer: over a forty-year period she wrote more than five hundred episodes of the ‘Detective’s Album’ for the Australian Journal, as well as romances, autobiography, memoirs, and other serials. If there were a single version of colonial identity organised around the city or the bush, it would emerge from that vast body of work. It does not. Louisa Atkinson, like Fortune, wrote extensively for the periodical press, but differed in that she was born in Australia. She wrote in part to convince those born in other places to value the natural world and not to exploit it, and in some respects she can be seen as part of a vast colonial enterprise aimed at generating scientific understanding of so-called ‘new worlds.’ Botanist Joseph Banks, who travelled with Captain James Cook, had been followed by a long line of scientists amateur and professional, some of whom made their homes in the colonies while many of the most notable, like Charles Darwin, John Gould and Alan Cunningham, were itinerant, mounting raids for ‘specimens’ then returning to Britain, the ‘metropolis’ or ‘centre’ of scientific research. Baron Ferdinand Von Mueller, the Victorian Government botanist, noted for his disdain of female amateur collectors, highly admired Atkinson, acknowledging her discoveries by naming a number of the plants she discovered after her. In George Bentham’s classic seven-volume Flora Australiensis (prepared with Von Mueller’s assistance) Atkinson’s specimens are acknowledged 116 times. By transporting her plant specimens physically, Atkinson could correct the errors made by the itinerant male botanists who strode over the land to collect plants but did not live with it. A visionary with regard to the land and landscape, Atkinson was a botanist, a taxidermist, a botanical illustrator, a newspaper columnist, and a novelist. Despite her youth, her upbringing – immersed in the bush with her mother and siblings, finding refuge from an exploitative and difficult family situation – she could see that the land was already suffering from wanton exploitation. She could also see that fear of the land could itself become a destructive force in the hands of the colonisers, although for her and her family, the natural world is a place of refuge and sustenance. On the basis of superior knowledge and the legitimacy derived from being ‘local,’ she attempts to guide those who are homesick into stopping their attempts to remake Australia in the image of England. She is not accusing, but adopts a conversational tone, suggesting that ‘[i]n these busy times, and in the universal pursuit of wealth which characterises the state of things among us, the beauties of nature are in danger of being overlooked’ (‘Notes on the Months’ 2). Part of the problem, as Atkinson presents it, is the tendency of colonists to look to other places, leaving Australia without chroniclers who will in the first instance pay careful attention to their surroundings, and then, be listened to. ‘So numerous are the writers who have illustrated the beauties of England, that ignorance of them, on the part of any one who can read, must be voluntary’; contrastingly, ‘Australia, a land of many wonders, claims similar attention,’ or rather, should claim such attention but does not. In 1853 the majority of the colonial population was still made up of migrants and the way Atkinson describes nature reflects an awareness of the need to

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persuade her readers first of the beauty of the landscape, second of the need to reject the exploitative habit of mind. They who say our birds are songless should spend a little while in some dwelling near these thick tangled woods, and they would find that the error might have arisen from their having dwelt in towns or places where would-be sportsmen had destroyed most of the feathered tribes. (‘A Voice … August’ 2) Atkinson’s ambition extended to improving the way people viewed spiders and snakes, describing the latter as ‘more sinned against than sinning’ because as a general rule they are quite timid and ‘willingly avoid collision’ (‘A Voice … Reptilia’ 2). Yet she also clear-sightedly observed that feral cats were a ‘dangerous adjunct to our carnivora’ (‘A Voice … Among the Murrumbidgee’ 2). Atkinson’s family’s existence in the Shoalhaven was contingent on the goodwill of the local Indigenous people: she noted that ‘[a] great sin lies on us as a people, for much has been done to injure, and little to benefit the poor original possessors of our farms and runs’ (‘A Voice … Recollections’ 3). But although she seems to have made use of their expertise in her work, Atkinson characterises Australian Indigenous people as serendipitous gatherers rather than as people who, like her, have highly systematised forms of environmental knowledge. She describes the way Australian Aboriginal people see the world, suggesting that they seem to ‘pity the Europeans, as persons under self-imposed slavery to toil, holding themselves as quite their superiors’ (‘A Voice … Recollections’ 3). Proud of being born in Australia, Atkinson tells her readers that the Indigenous population made the distinction between the native born and the immigrant European: ‘“You brudder of mine; all same as me, native” is a high mark of esteem’ (‘A Voice … Recollections’ 3). Writing in 1870, Atkinson identifies various things killing the forests of New South Wales, explaining that the immediate effect of clearing on a large scale is to render the land ‘marshy and unfit for sheep pastures.’ She adds: … forests have acted as safety valves to carry off the superfluous moisture of the earth, and attract that of the atmosphere, thus forming a circulating system. The minor vegetation is undergoing a considerable change. Rushes and aquatic plants present themselves in erstwhile dry regions. In time, there is much reason to fear, this excessive humidity will give place to the reverse; and, like other treeless countries, we shall suffer from an arid climate and soil. But our wide forests render such a catastrophe a misfortune in the distance. (‘A Voice … After Shells’ 5) Atkinson wrote to inform colonial readers about the Australian bush, her mission being to encourage old and new inhabitants to become aware of the beauty that was around them. For Henning, the bush was the world to which she became accustomed and attached after many years in her birthplace of England, whereas for the Irish-born Fortune and Hamilton Dunlop it was a literary setting, for sensation fiction and memoir (Fortune), and for poetry that attempted to evoke sympathy for Australian Indigenous people (Dunlop). The simple dichotomy between bush and city that is the foundation of the debate between Lawson and Paterson does not really exist other than in the imagination – although perhaps, ironically, this is less true for Atkinson, the most deeply immersed in the non-urban world of the writers whose work is discussed here. And yet, the suggestion of estrangement remains, in the sense that there has been enduring refusal to engage with the materiality of the land: as the recent resurgence of ‘rural Gothic’ suggests, for most Australian readers, particularly non-Indigenous ones, ‘the bush’ stubbornly remains in the realm of the imagination.

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Notes







Works Cited Allingham, Anne. ‘Challenging the Editing of the Rachel Henning Letters.’ Australian Literary Studies 16.3 (1994): 262–279. Anon. Untitled [Text of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s ‘An Aboriginal Mother’ with comments on an upcoming concert]. Sydney Herald 15 Oct. 1841: 2. [Atkinson, Louisa.] ‘A Voice from the Country: August.’ Sydney Herald 10 Sept. 1860: 2. ———. ‘A Voice from the Country: Reptilia.’ Sydney Herald 1 May 1861: 2. ———. ‘A Voice from the Country: Recollections of the Aborigines [sic].’ Sydney Herald 22 Sept. 1863: 3. ———. ‘A Voice from the Country: Among the Murrumbidgee Limestones.’ Sydney Herald 11 May 1870: 2. ———. ‘A Voice from the Country: After Shells in the Limestone.’ Sydney Herald 24 May 1870: 5. ——— [as L.A.]. ‘Notes on the Months: October.’ Illustrated Sydney News 15 Oct. 1853: 2. Bode, Katherine. A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2018. ———. Reading by Numbers. London: Anthem, 2012. Boldrewood, Rolf. Robbery under Arms. 1882–1883. London: Remington, 1888. 3 vols. Chan, Gabrielle. ‘A Time to Cull: The Battle over Australia’s Brumbies.’ Guardian 20 Aug. 2014. . Clacy, Ellen. A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings in 1852–53. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1853. Clark, Anna, and Stuart Macintyre. The History Wars. Rev. ed. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004. Cosgrove, Bryony. ‘The Creation of Rachel Henning: Personal Correspondence to Publishing Phenomenon.’ Australian Literary Studies 27.3–4 (2012): 74–91. Daley, Paul. ‘Leah Purcell on Reinventing The Drover’s Wife Three Times: “I Borrowed and Stole from Each.”’ Guardian 22 Dec. 2019. . Davison, Graeme. ‘The Exodists: Miles Franklin, Jill Roe and the “Drift to the Metropolis.”’ History Australia 2.2 (2005): 1–11. ———. ‘Rethinking the Australian Legend.’ Australian Historical Studies 43 (2012): 429–451. ———. ‘Just Camping Out? A Reply to Bill Garner.’ Australian Historical Studies 43 (2012): 466–471. Dovey, Ceridwen. ‘The Mapping of Massacres.’ New Yorker 7 Dec. 2017. . Dunlop, Eliza Hamilton. ‘An Aboriginal Mother [Letter].’ Sydney Herald 29 Nov. 1841: 2. ——— [as E.H.D.]. ‘Songs of an Exile No. 4: The Aboriginal Mother (From Myall’s Creek) [Poem].’ Australian 13 Dec. 1838: 4. ——— [as E.H. Dunlop]. ‘Native Poetry.’ Sydney Herald 11 Oct. 1848: 3. Fortune, Mary [as M.H.F] ‘Melbourne Cemetery.’ Australian Journal (November 1869): 180–181.

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The Metropolis or the Bush? ———. [as Waif Wander/W.W.]. ‘Twenty-Six Years Ago, or, the Diggings from ’55.’ Australian Journal (Sept. 1882): 33–37; ( Jan. 1883): 280–285; (Feb. 1883): 338–343; (Mar. 1883): 370–384; (Apr. 1883): 445–448; (May 1883): 508–510. Garner, Bill. ‘Bushmen at the Bulletin: Re-Examining Lawson’s “Bush Credibility” in Graeme Davison’s “Sydney and the Bush.”’ Australian Historical Studies 43 (2012): 452–465. Hansord, Katie. ‘Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s “The Aboriginal Mother”: Romanticism, Anti-Slavery, and Imperial Feminism in the Nineteenth Century.’ JASAL 11.1 (2011): 1–14. Henning, Rachel. The Letters of Rachel Henning. North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1986. Kramer, Leonie. ‘Gordon, Adam Lindsay (1833–1870).’ Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. 1972. . Langton, Marcia. Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia. London: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018. Lawson, Henry. ‘Borderland.’ Bulletin 9 Jul. 1892: 21. ———. ‘The Drover’s Wife.’ Bulletin 23 Jul. 1892: 21–22. Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu. Broome, WA: Magabala, 2014. Paterson, A.B. ‘Clancy of the Overflow.’ Bulletin 21 Dec. 1889: 17. ———. ‘The Man from Snowy River’ Bulletin 26 Oct. 1890: 15. ———. ‘In Defence of the Bush.’ Bulletin 23 Jul. 1892: 15. ———. ‘In Defence of the Bush: An Answer to Various Bards.’ Bulletin 1 Oct. 1892: 4. Reynolds, Henry. Why Weren’t We Told: A Personal Search for the Truth About Our History. Ringwood, VIC: Viking, 1999. ———. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. 1981. Kensington: U of New South Wales P, 2004. Rooney, Brigid. Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity. London: Anthem, 2018. Ryan, Lyndall, et al. Colonial Frontier Massacres Australia [‘Massacre Map’]. . Schaffer, Kay. Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Ward, Russel. The Australian Legend. 2nd ed. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1966. Waterhouse, Richard. The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia. Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, 2005. Wright, Alexis. Tracker. Artarmon: Giramondo, 2017. Wright, Judith. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1966.

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4 THE WEEPING KANGAROO Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver

Kangaroo hunting was an important activity in colonial Australian life; it provided much-needed sustenance to early settlers; it provided employment, especially when land was being cleared for pasture; and it developed as a popular sport, enabling wealthier settlers to develop and consolidate influential social networks. It also soon became an available genre of writing, found in poetry, fiction, chronicles of exploration and travel, journalism, and memoirs. The first poem to be published in Australia on an Australian topic was in fact about a settler hunting a wallaby. The anonymous ‘Colonial Hunt’ was printed in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser on 16 June 1805 and is worth quoting here in full: When Sol has commenc’d his diurnal career, And the bright spangled dew drops from buds disappear, With my dog and my gun to the forest I fly, Where in stately confusion rich gums sweep the sky. Then anxious, my eyes each direction pursue, Till the fleet footed WALLABY rises to view! I point to the Game, and uplifting my hand, Brisk Lurcher, obedient, flies off to command:– Perceiving her danger, Puss doubles her pace, And well prim’d and loaded, I bring up the chace, Exclaiming, transported the course to review, ‘Hoick! hoick! my bold Lurcher! Well led Kanguroo!’ Fatigu’d, broken hearted, tears gush from her eyes: In vain to the thicket for shelter she flies: Secure for a moment – yet shouts rend her ears, And the brush fired round her, again she appears. Delighted the Victim once more to behold, Away scampers Lurcher – and gets a firm hold. In vain has she doubled, since now she must yield: A stream from her haunches empurples the field: My transports subside – gentle Pity takes place, And Death puts an end to the joys of the Chace. Then varied my toil, to my cottage I come, And a sweet smiling Welcome proclaims me at home! (Anon, ‘Colonial Hunt’ 4)

This foundational New South Wales poem is an early translation of English hunting poetry traditions into a local colonial context. It clearly draws on aspects of that English tradition: to begin a hunting poem with a celebration of the early morning, for example, goes back at least as far as William Grey’s popular ballad, ‘The Hunt is Up’ (1537): 34

Weeping Kangaroo The east is bright with morning light, And darkness it is fled, And the merie horne wakes up the morne To leave his idle bed. (60)

Here, the hunting horn calls the day into motion. In ‘Colonial Hunt,’ however, it seems as if the hunter is called into action by the rising sun itself. The galloping pace of this poem is also generic to English hunting poetry, with four stresses per line, beginning with the second or third syllable and then every third syllable after that with the final stress on the line’s last word. The poetical term for this is anapestic tetrameter, a rhythm sometimes used by other hunting poems, most memorably perhaps in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876). Other English generic features in ‘Colonial Hunt’ include the hunter’s shout of encouragement to his dog, ‘Hoick!’ – described in John Badcock’s 1823 dictionary of hunting slang as ‘the cheer used by hunters at the death’ (qtd in Bee 197). And the wallaby is given a nickname, ‘Puss,’ which genders it female and also links it to older commentaries about English hare-hunting. As Donna Landry writes, ‘by the eighteenth century, the hunted hare would be generically feminised as “bold puss,” a tradition that has continued [in hunting narratives] to this day’ (39). The most famous English hunting song is probably John Woodcock Graves’s ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’ (c. 1825): D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay? D’ye ken John Peel at the break o’ day? D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far a-way. With his hounds and his horn in the morning? (Graves lines 1–4)

Graves and Peel were friends and hunting companions in Cumberland; Peel was a well-known hunter of foxes and hares. The story goes that when Peel heard Graves sing his hunting song one evening, ‘a stream of tears … fell down his manly cheeks’ (Aslet 379). Graves emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land a few years later, in 1833, where he led a relatively turbulent life as a settler, inventor, entrepreneur – and hunter. On his son’s extensive property in West Hobart, he is supposed to have kept a collection of native species (‘kangaroos, emus, wa llabies, opossums’) and ‘some English game’ (Miles 34). In 1889, three years after his death, the Tasmanian Mail published one of Graves’s later poems, about a kangaroo hunt. Here are the first three verses: Awake, huntsman, awake, and no longer thou sleep, And waste not this morn’s rosy hour, The dawning of day is beginning to peep, And gilding each roseate bower. Arise, and away, while the forester grey Through the greenwood so fleetly is bounding; Thro’ forest and dale, and gone far, far away, While the horn and the echo were sounding. Well-mounted to forest let everyone ride, Will cheer the hounds up into view. And we’ll drink to his health (when the long run is done), And the brush of the first Kangaroo. (Anon, ‘Hunting Songs’ lines 1–12)

This early morning colonial hunt is literally transposed from England to Australia by an emigrant poet; the ‘brush’ of the kangaroo is a colonial version of the fox’s tail and Australian bush is still quaintly figured in English terms as a ‘greenwood,’ although the ‘forester grey’ suggests a more local familiarity. The 1805 ‘Colonial Hunt,’ on the other hand, registers the novelty of its subject matter, naming the wallaby in capital letters as the hunter’s quarry and then adding the name ‘Kanguroo’ soon afterwards, possibly as a way of generalising the identity of what was then a recently recognised 35

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native species. The emphasis here is on hunting as a definitive colonial activity, yet it also seems as if the poem resolutely ignores or represses its real colonial conditions. The hunter goes into the bush with his gun and his dog Lurcher (named after its breed, a sighthound cross), and kills a wallaby. When he returns to his cottage after the kill he is welcomed home, presumably by his wife. There is no sense in this poem of early colonial Sydney and its environs as a site of military occupation and frontier violence. In fact, the same issue of the Sydney Gazette had reported that local Darug people ‘did considerable damage’ to a farm on the Hawkesbury River, ‘continuing to menace the neighbouring settlers’ (Anon, ‘Sydney’ 2). John Connor discusses this raid in The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838, emphasising the precariousness of settler properties and their occupants during this time (41). But even at such an early stage of settlement, ‘Colonial Hunt’ already imagines a space through which a settler could travel, and hunt, freely and without interruption – returning at the end to the welcoming security of a place now identified as ‘home.’ This is something it shares, perhaps unexpectedly, with Graves’s much later Tasmanian poem. There are no Aboriginal people in ‘Colonial Hunt’; this early Sydney settler has the wallaby all to himself. When the wallaby appears in the poem, the hunter gives himself over to the ‘joys of the Chace’: the word invokes the title of William Somerville’s famous 1735 English hunting poem. ‘Well led Kanguroo!’ is a compliment to the quarry’s ability to make the hunt a challenging and pleasurable one. But the wallaby in this poem also knows she will die early on. Gendering the wallaby as female is important to the emotion of the poem as she begins to weep, not long after the chase has begun: ‘broken hearted, tears gush from her eyes.’ We can think about what it means for the first published poem with Australian content to give us a weeping kangaroo – and a hunter, the voice of the poem, who responds by being moved to ‘pity’ after her death. The description of a kangaroo that weeps at the moment of its death comes from another English tradition of hunting narratives, this time about the ‘sobbing deer’ – where the stag is cast as a noble victim whose life has been tragically cut short. In A View to a Death in the Morning (1996) – the title comes from a later verse in Graves’s ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’ – Matt Cartmill traces the long history of this trope, particularly prevalent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: for example, in Margaret Cavendish’s ‘The Hunting of the Stag’ from Poems and Fancies (1653): The Stag no hope had left, nor help did ’spy, His Heart so heavy grew with Grief and Care … But Fate his thread had spun, so downe did fall, Shedding some Teares at his owne Funerall. (116)

The death of the wallaby in ‘Colonial Hunt’ most likely references a well-known scene along these lines in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1603), where Duke Senior has been exiled, with several Lords, to the forest of Arden. Here, the Lords tell the Duke about Jacques, a nobleman and a noted melancholic who had been seen attending a wounded stag in the forest, after a hunt. ‘The wretched animal heaved forth such groans,’ one of them says, ‘That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat / Almost to bursting, and the big round tears / Coursed one another down his innocent nose / In piteous chase’ (Act 2, Scene 1, lines 36–40). The Lords listen as Jacques goes on to condemn the hunters who ‘fright the animals and … kill them up / In their assigned and native dwelling place’ (lines 62–63). He is last seen ‘weeping and commenting / Upon the sobbing deer’ (lines 65–66). In ‘Colonial Hunt,’ the hunter’s pity for the weeping kangaroo or wallaby does not turn into the dogged melancholy of Jacques. It does not make him rail against the cruelties of hunting, and it does not prevent him from moving easily to yet another settler occupation (‘Then varied my toil…’) before returning home to his wife. Even so, there is something transgressive about the poem, especially since the wallaby is cast as a weeping woman – as if the hunter has committed a terrible act of gendered violence in the forest, to which his wife is oblivious. The way the hunter’s ‘transports subside’ after the death of the animal seems to resonate with what Cartmill calls 36

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‘the profane extreme of the spectrum of hunting symbolism’ where a hunter’s pleasure in the kill can seem almost orgasmic (69). It is perhaps worth noting that the blood flowing from the dying female kangaroo – ‘A stream from her haunches empurples the field’ – recalls lines in another English hunting poem, Richard Powney’s ‘The Stag Chace in Windsor Forest’ (1742): ‘Now here, now there, in giddy Maze they ride, / And Streams run purple from the Courser’s Side’ (57–58). So ‘Colonial Hunt’ is a hunting poem that knows a great deal about its own literary antecedents. The weeping kangaroo went on to become an occasionally reproduced poetical trope in colonial Australian writing, putting the hunter into a sympathetic relation with the dying animal once the ‘joy of the chase’ is over. An account of kangaroo hunting near Newcastle in 1827 actually cites the passage above from As You Like It, used here as a way of shifting the mood from enjoyment to ‘regret’ and turning the hunt from ‘sport’ into ‘slaughter’: We had an excellent day’s sport on the parson’s farm, killed five large kangaroo’s [sic] and started about fifty others in the space of five hours, with about ten or a dozen dogs. We were in at the death of one of them. ‘The Wretched animal heav’d forth such groans, That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat, Almost to bursting; and the big round tears Coursed one another down his innocent nose.’ I could not help regretting such a wholesale and useless slaughter. (Anon, ‘Account of Hunter’s River’ 2) George Bennett, a surgeon and naturalist, had visited Australia twice, in 1829 and 1832; his Wanderings in NSW, Batavia, Pedir Coast, Singapore and China (1834) chronicled the developing social and cultural life of colonial New South Wales and provided a remarkably detailed account of local flora and fauna and (much less reliably) Aboriginal customs and practices. Bennett goes kangaroo hunting on the plains not far from Tumut River to the west of Canberra, where he sees his party’s dogs kill ‘a female of the common species’ (287). Soon afterwards, he dissects the corpse. Affected by the event, he offers a stylised appreciation of the figure of the dying kangaroo, casting it as aesthetically significant enough to attract the attention of the British painter Sir Edwin Landseer. Landseer was renowned for his portraits of horses, dogs, and stags, as well as for his powerful hunting scenes which often highlighted the suffering of animals at the moment of their death – like The Hunting of Chevy Chase (c. 1826) or The Dying Stag (c. 1830). Interestingly, Bennett’s description also repeats some of the imagery in ‘Colonial Hunt’ (for example, ‘A stream from her haunches empurples the field’): The dying kangaroo would afford a subject worthy of the inimitable pencil of Landseer, as it lies prostrate on that ground, where, but a few minutes before, it fed and gambolled, unconscious of danger, moaning piteously under the unmerciful fangs of the hounds: its eyes, dim with tears, seeming to upbraid the hunter for his cruelty. No one can behold the tragic scene without feelings of regret, as the dogs worry the animal until the hunter dismounts, and passing his knife across the creature’s throat, the crimson stream flows, and the fixed glassy eye indicates the termination of life. (290–291) The dying kangaroo is written as a ‘tragic scene’ here, a worthy subject of poetry and portraiture. Once again, the account turns the triumph of the kill into ‘regret,’ although the hunter’s knife efficiently puts an end to any lingering melancholy. The English-born artist and naturalist George French Angas arrived in Adelaide on New Year’s Day in 1844, aged 21. Travelling through South Australia on various expeditions, he recorded his experiences visually in many watercolours – including one titled Kangaroo Hunting, 37

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Near Port Lincoln, in Angas’s South Australia Illustrated (1847). His account of his travels through the antipodes was published in London in the same year, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand. Here, Angas describes attending a kangaroo hunt in April 1844 along the Coorong, south of Victor Harbour. His party pursue a large ‘boomer’ and soon the kangaroo is held at bay by a couple of dogs, a scene he sketched for his book. ‘He was a noble creature,’ Angas writes, …and fought desperately with his fore-paws; a single kick with his hind-feet would have laid one of the dogs dead. It was a cruel sight to see the poor beast struggling hard for life beneath the bright sky, in his own free deserts; his large and eloquent eyes filled with tears, and his head and shoulders covered with blood. (143) The weeping kangaroo is gendered male here and cast as a powerful opponent. But the mixture of tears and blood are enough to generate some pity and the kangaroo is dignified with an elevated status (‘noble,’ with ‘eloquent eyes’) as a result – very much in the vein of the suffering stag in Landseer’s hunting scenes. Descriptions of weeping, dying kangaroos are intermittently scattered through colonial writing. The emigrant physician James Bennett Clutterbuck drew a direct link between the ‘sobbing deer’ and the ‘weeping kangaroo’ in his book, Port Phillip in 1849 (1850): Whatever gratification some may derive from a kangaroo hunt, others, I may venture to affirm, never return from the chase with out a sense of the pain and anguish which are inflicted on this poor animal. Its pitiful, gazelle-like look, imploring, as it were, for life, during the last few moments of its struggles, ought to melt the heart of the keenest sportsman. (36) Examples like these see hunters expressing regret for the kill; they could even generate enough sympathy for the dying animal to make the participants reject kangaroo hunting outright. Emilia Marryat Norris was the daughter of the bestselling sea adventure novelist, Captain Frederick Marryat. She wrote sea adventure novels herself, some of which were set in the Pacific. Norris never actually visited Australia, but she was one of several nineteenth-century English women writers (for example, Sarah Porter, Sarah Bowditch Lee, Anne Bowman) who wrote about colonial kangaroo hunts in their fiction. In Jack Stanley; or, the Young Adventurers (1882), a seasoned military officer, Colonel Bradshaw, describes a kangaroo hunt to the eponymous hero to show the young man ‘why I dislike the idea of it’ (252). In this account, the hunting party singles out ‘one large male kangaroo’ and their dogs run it down until it is exhausted. ‘I was nearest to him at the time he gave in,’ the Colonel says, …and I saw him rushed upon by the savage brutes, who gnawed and worried him, covering his soft grey fur with blood. He stood impotently beating the air with his forefeet, and the great tears ran from his beautiful eyes and down his cheeks. I was thankful that I was armed with a gun, that I might as soon as possible shoot the poor beast dead; and by the time the others came up, I was standing over him, feeling in my own mind that I had joined in a cowardly, unmanly sport, and vainly regretting that I had been an accessory in any degree to what I now looked upon as unworthy of me. (254) Interestingly, the Colonel’s account is very close to Bennett’s description of the weeping, dying kangaroo above; clearly, this is now a transferable literary trope. The difference in this case is that a female novelist presents a retired soldier who is sufficiently moved by the sight of the kangaroo not only to regret the killing but also to disavow the ‘idea’ of the hunt altogether. Male kangaroo tears from ‘beautiful eyes’ are enough to turn hunting into something ‘unmanly’ (for men). In an illuminating 38

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commentary on this novel, Robin Pope suggests the weeping kangaroo – whether male or female – makes the hunt seem, to the Colonel, like ‘the slaughter of defenceless women’ (143). Another example presents a different view of the weeping kangaroo and a hunter’s regret, and takes us back to poetry. Malta-born Francis Adams was a novelist, poet, dramatist, and radical social commentator who lived in Australia – Sydney and Brisbane – for much of the later 1880s. His Poetical Works of Francis W.L. Adams was published in Brisbane and London in 1887 – and one of the poems in this collection is ‘The Kangaroo Hunt.’ Adams was an admirer of the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon and paid tribute to the latter’s ‘regular and rhymed rhythms’ and the valorisation of Australian manhood and horsemanship in his verse (12). But he also commented at length on Gordon’s ‘failure’ as a writer and his suicide at Brighton beach in Melbourne. Adams himself committed suicide after years of debilitating illness, in 1893. Suffering from chronic tuberculosis, it seems unlikely that he ever participated in a kangaroo hunt himself, although he lived on a sheep station near Jerilderie in the mid-1880s and may well have seen hunts take place. Adams’s ‘The Kangaroo Hunt’ brings poet, hunter and reader together in a shared firsthand experience of sport, perhaps in the spirit of Gordon – and certainly in the spirit of his regular, rhymed rhythms. The kangaroo hunt poem is as generic in the late 1880s as it was for that anonymous colonial poet in 1805, but Adams’s poem has some important points of difference. Once again a hunter rises early in the morning, but this time he goes out with a party, horses, and two kangaroo dogs: one female, ’Squito, and one male, Wheels: Up and away by the break of day, Over the silvery plain; ’Squito and Wheels atrot at our heels. Our horses all flash and fain. Up soars the sun. Hoop! Yonder is one; An ‘old man,’ too! Set on the dogs. Off, off we go, bent down to the bow, As we crash through the scrub-tress and logs. Now we are clear. We have got him, no fear. Dear horse of me, spare you no breath; My life’s in my knees, and you hound as they squeeze, We mean to be in at the death! O the wild rush past grass, tree, and bush, The whistling wind and the sun! Where it is, if you’ll tell, we’ll ride into hell And out again ere we have done! Over the ground, fourteen feet at each bound, The kangaroo strikes wild ahead. O swift she sails by, the grey lightning pup! She’s turned him; his feet are like lead. He’s round; he’s at bay. Now, ’Squito, girl, stay; You’re too pretty a damsel for him. In she goes! At her heels to his throat leaps old Wheels. They’re down. He’s done, Seraphim!... Quite dead … on the plain he’ll browse never again. His mate, will she pine? Can I know? I’ve been glad, I’ve been mad, and now I am sad. ‘Have you done?’ I say, ‘Let us go.’ (37–38)

The quarry here is another large male kangaroo and the poem is determined to kill it early on (‘We mean to be in at the death!’). A series of exclamation marks underscores the pace and frenzy 39

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of the hunt, almost to the point where hunter, dogs and horse become one and the same (‘Dear horse of me … you hound as they squeeze’). Interestingly, the cry ‘Hoick!’ in ‘Colonial Hunt’ is now ‘Hoop!’ in Adams’s poem, perhaps a version of ‘whoop!,’ an early-morning rallying cry; it appears in Sir Walter Scott’s hunting poem ‘The Chase’ (1810), ‘With bark, and whoop, and wild halloo’ (Canto I, Part 3, line 9). It may also tie the hunt to a horse race, since in Australia a hoop is a term sometimes applied to a jockey. The gendering of the hunting dogs is important here. The hunter does not want his ‘pretty’ female to attack the ‘old man,’ even though she jumps in regardless. The word ‘dead’ at the beginning of the last verse is a delayed rhyme with ‘ahead’ and ‘lead’ in the fifth stanza, bringing the hunt and the poem to a close and triggering a final moment of poetic reflection (following the ellipsis after ‘dead’). Killing a kangaroo means literally taking native species out of their habitat: ‘On the plain he’ll never browse again.’ But the hunter also wonders if the kangaroo’s mate is now conscious of her loss (‘Can I know?’), as if the hunt has produced a grieving widow. This is as close as the poem gets to a weeping kangaroo, but it is enough to take the hunter from the frenzy and immediacy of the chase to something like a closing state of melancholy. In the last line it is not clear who asks, ‘Have you done?’ – the hunter himself? other members of the hunting party? the female kangaroo, perhaps? (The question echoes ‘Can I know?’) Either way, the poem’s Prufrockian ending (‘Let us go then, you and I’) gives expression to the regret that comes to the hunter as he ponders the consequences of his kill. A kangaroo’s tears are a way of allowing the kangaroo to express its suffering; they also enable some level of empathy between hunter and species, forcing the hunter to reflect on the consequences of his violent act. Ethel C. Pedley’s fin-de-siécle colonial fantasy Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) interestingly takes this a step further, giving the kangaroo the capacity to fully articulate its position as a hunted species. Pedley was a successful violinist, vocalist and music teacher. Born in England, she arrived in Sydney with her family in 1873. She later trained in London at the Royal Academy of Music, returning to Sydney in 1882 where she became well-known locally as a musical performer and founder of the St Cecilia all-female choir. She died of cancer in August 1898, aged 39. Dot and the Kangaroo was published posthumously the following year in London, with 19 black-and-white illustrations by Frank P. Mahony, best known at the time for his magazine sketches of bush scenes and bush workers. His illustrations for Pedley’s children’s fantasy narrative were probably the first time Mahony had drawn kangaroos. Dot and the Kangaroo begins with a dedication: ‘To the Children of Australia, in the hope of enlisting their sympathies for the many beautiful, amiable, and frolicsome creatures of their fair land, whose extinction, through ruthless destruction, is being surely accomplished.’ This is a narrative that – just prior to Federation – wants to put species extinction onto a national agenda. The aim is to educate children about native animals, kangaroos in particular; and children are expected to educate adults, in turn. The story begins with a young girl, Dot, who – chasing after a hare in Alice-like fashion – finds herself lost in the bush, ‘miles away from her father’s selection’ (2). Her thoughts immediately turn to cases of other lost children who were never found, and she begins to cry. The lost child in the bush was by this time a familiar trope in representations of colonial life: a well-known example is Frederick McCubbin’s Lost (1886), an oil painting of a young girl weeping among tall gum trees that may have drawn on the case of Clara Crosby, a 12-year-old girl who disappeared on the way to a selector’s property near Lilydale, Victoria. Crosby was in fact found a few weeks later. ‘She had kept herself alive by eating berries, succulent roots and herbs,’ the Age reported in June 1885; ‘Her scanty clothing was saturated with moisture and literally in rags’ (Anon, ‘Lost for Three Weeks in the Bush’ 5). In Pedley’s narrative, a large grey kangaroo comes up to Dot and begins to weep in sympathy for her (‘for down the animal’s nice soft grey muzzle two tiny little tears were slowly trickling’ [2]). The kangaroo is not lamenting its own demise; it is instead empathising with the predicament of a lost little girl. Kangaroo (her name is capitalised in the story) hops away and soon returns with ‘a spray of berries’ in her hand. Dot 40

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eats the berries – just like Clara Crosby – and suddenly she is able to understand the language of animals. The berries transform the forest from a silent, eerie place to a place full of chatter and information (about species): suddenly, ‘the whole bush seemed filled with talking’ (3). Anxiety over a lost child becomes a theme in the story. It turns out that Kangaroo had taken her joey out of her pouch during a hunt, hiding him in the scrub in an attempt to save him. But when she returns to recover the infant, he is gone. This is in fact a version of what C.N. Johnson, in a scientific study of the relationship between wallaby mothers and their joeys, calls ‘separation in flight’ (8). When disturbed, Johnson writes, the mother and the young-at-foot would flee to different patches of cover … I often suspected, and on several occasions was able to confirm by careful observation … that the two rejoined soon afterwards. Both mother and infant seemed to be active in bringing about their reunion. (9) Commentaries on the colonial kangaroo hunt routinely observed the separation of a kangaroo and its joey, viewing it in a variety of ways. In his popular chronicle Two Years in New South Wales (1827), the visiting surgeon Peter Cunningham casts it as a desperate act of self-preservation, which he then invests with sympathy and sentimentality: When hard hunted, the mother will stop suddenly, thrust her fore-paws into her pouch, drag out the young one and throw it away, that she may hop lighter along. They are always very hard pressed however before they thus sacrifice the life of their off-spring, to save their own; and it is pitiful to see the tender sympathetic looks they will sometimes cast back at the poor little helpless creatures they’ve been forced to desert. (313) The transported Irish nationalist John Mitchel’s description of a kangaroo hunt in Jail Journal includes the killing of a large female kangaroo still carrying a joey that ‘she had not time to throw away.’ He notes, The females, always, as they rise from their lair, at sight of an enemy, put their hands in their pockets and throw their young ones into some place of safety, that they themselves may run the lighter. This one had fought desperately for her life and her little joey, as the young are called. (293) In Dot and the Kangaroo, the Kangaroo gives a personal voice to this recurring narrative, investing the horror of separation from her joey with maternal emotion and a deep sense of regret. She tells Dot what happened when hunters pursued her to the point of exhaustion: ‘I asked Joey if I dropped him into a soft bush whether he would hide until I came back for him. It was our only chance. I had an idea that if I did that he would be safe – even if I got killed; as they would be more likely to follow me, and never think I had parted from my little Joey. So we did this, and I crossed a creek, which put the hounds off the scent, and I got away. In the dusk I came back again to find Joey, but he had gone, and I could not find any trace of him. All night and all day I searched, but I’ve never seen my Joey since,’ said the Kangaroo sadly, and Dot saw the tears dim her eyes. (Pedley 49–50) This is another weeping kangaroo moment, when a mother is separated from her child. Hunting becomes the traumatic core of this story, continually present in the lives of species who incessantly talk about it and fear it. The Kangaroo is melancholic because she has lost her child, but she is also 41

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fatalistic because native species are treated by humans only as game and quarry: ‘sooner or later,’ she tells Dot, ‘we all get murdered.’ Dot and the Kangaroo is a children’s fantasy about native species that invests its whimsy and sentiment with a dark foreboding that at times touches the apocalyptic. ‘White Humans are cruel, and love to murder,’ the Kangaroo says. ‘We must all die’ (9, 15). Later on, Dot and the Kangaroo come across an Aboriginal corroboree where ‘painted figures’ appear, ‘like fiends and skeletons’ (37). The racism of this scene has often been remarked on (see, for example, Smith 195); we can note here that it is entirely clichéd and formulaic, reproducing the trope of the corroboree that routinely flows through colonial Australian writing, notably, in Marcus Clarke’s famous ‘weird melancholy’ commentary in the introduction to Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1876). For the Kangaroo, on the other hand, Aboriginal people are ‘ just Humans’ in as much as they all ‘kill kangaroos.’ ‘The Black Humans kill and devour us,’ she tells Dot; ‘but they, even, are not so terrible as the Whites, who delight in taking our lives, and torturing us just as an amusement’ (Pedley 15). Soon afterwards, the Kangaroo – with Dot in her pouch – is pursued by Aboriginal people and a pack of dingoes. Dot begs the Kangaroo to leave her behind, but the Kangaroo refuses to be separated from what has now become her surrogate child (‘Never again!’ [41]). A dingo attacks the Kangaroo, who holds it in a ‘tight embrace’ (43), and then tears its body open with her hind claw. With other dingoes still in pursuit, she leaps over a gully and lands them both to safety on the other side. There are two kangaroo hunts in Dot and the Kangaroo: the originating narrative that sees the Kangaroo lose her joey, and the chase involving Aboriginal people and dingoes where the Kangaroo fights to keep Dot with her. After some further adventures, a Wagtail points them in the direction of Dot’s farm; but as they approach, Dot’s father emerges holding a gun, along with Jack, a stockman. ‘The next instant,’ the story tells us, the Kangaroo bounded out of the bush into the open paddock. Swift as lightning up went the cruel gun, but, as it exploded with a terrible report, the man, Jack, struck it upwards, and the fatal bullet lodged in the branch of a tall gum tree. (77) The father’s reflex action to shoot a native species on sight almost ends in tragedy: shooting a kangaroo here would mean shooting your own child. Instead, Dot tumbles out of the Kangaroo’s pouch and quickly tells her story. The father immediately renounces hunting altogether. Later he turns his property into a sanctuary for native species; and the mother also learns ‘to be kind to the bush creatures, and protect them all we can’ (79). The Kangaroo’s joey appears and mother and child are similarly reunited, because it turns out that Jack had brought the joey to the farm as a pet after the initial hunt. When they hop away, Dot realises she can no longer understand the languages of animals. But the fantasy has already performed its educational task. Dot has become what the story calls ‘an improved Human’ (39), which means recognising that humans are simply one species among many in a bush ecology with finite resources. This also means recognising the need to share space with species. The father creates a waterhole nearby and soon the bush animals and birds move freely across his property, undisturbed. Dot and the Kangaroo presents a kangaroo that weeps and talks emotionally about the traumatic experience of being hunted. But instead of turning her reproachful gaze on a single hunter, she addresses the nation itself, holding it to account in terms of its treatment of native species. Looking towards Federation and the beginning of the twentieth century, Ethel Pedley – already a dying woman – gives us a kangaroo that forgives human cruelty, offering the hope that future Australians will take Dot’s lesson away with them and reassess their own relationship to the natural world. 42

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Works Cited Adams, Francis. ‘The Kangaroo Hunt.’ A Century of Australian Song. Ed. Douglas Sladen. London: Walter Scott, 1888. Angas, George. Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand. Vol. 1. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1847. Anon. ‘Colonial Hunt.’ Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 16 Jun. 1805: 4. Anon. ‘Account of Hunter’s River: Letter III.’ Australian 7 Feb. 1827: 2. Anon. ‘Lost for Three Weeks in the Bush.’ Age 4 Jun. 1885: 5. Anon. ‘Hunting Songs,’ Tasmanian Mail 26 Oct. 1889: 7. Aslet, Clive. Villages of Britain: The Five Hundred Villages that Made the Countryside. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Bee, John. Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-Ton, and the Varieties of Life, Forming the Completest and Most Authentic Lexicon Balatronicum Hitherto Offered to the Notice of the Sporting World. London: T. Hughes, 1823. Bennett, George. Wanderings in NSW, Batavia, Pedir Coast, Singapore and China. Vol. 1. London: Richard Bentley, 1834. Cartmill, Matt. A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996. Cavendish, Margaret. Poems and Fancies. London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653. Clutterbuck, James B. Port Phillip in 1849. London: John W. Parker, 1850. Connor, John. The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2005. Cunningham, Peter. Two Years in New South Wales. Vol. 1. London: Henry Colburn, 1827. Graves, John Woodcock. ‘D’ye Ken John Peel?’ c. 1825. The Songs and Ballads of Cumberland. Ed. Sidney Gilpin. London: Geo. Routledge and Sons, 1866. 416–417. Grey, William. ‘The Hunt is Up.’ 1539. The Ballad Literature, and the Popular Music of the Olden Time. Vol.1. Ed. W. Chappell. London: Chappell and Co., 1855. 60. Johnson, C.N. ‘Relationships between Mother and Infant Red-Necked Wallabies (Macropus rufogriseus banksianus).’ Ethology 74 (1987): 1–20. Landry, Donna. The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Marryat, Emilia. Jack Stanley; or, the Young Adventurers. London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1882. Miles, T.A. ‘D’ye Ken John Peel?’ Walkabout 24.8 (1958): 34–36. Mitchel, John. Jail Journal; or, Five Years in British Prisons. New York: Citizen, 1854. Pedley, Ethel. Dot and the Kangaroo. Sydney, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1920. Pope, Robin. ‘Captivating Narratives: Reeling in the Nineteenth-Century Child Reader.’ La Trobe Journal 60 (1997): 134–148. Powney, Richard. ‘The Stag Chace in Windsor Forest.’ London: T. Cooper, 1742. Scott, Sir Walter. The Lady of the Lake: A Poem. Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Co., 1810. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. 1603. Ed. Leah S. Marcus. New York: WW Norton, 2011. Smith, Michelle J. ‘Transforming Narratives of Colonial Danger: Imagining the Environments of New Zealand and Australia in Children’s Literature, 1862–1899.’ Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Ed. Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 183–200.

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SECTION B

Early Twentieth-Century Australia

5 THE REFLECTIVE MOMENT Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Australia Susan Carson

In recent decades scholars have revisited debates about the characteristics of modernity in early twentieth-century Australia. Similarly, research in other nations has addressed the ways in which new technologies and changing global patterns of political and economic organisation impacted locally in the first half of the twentieth century. While there is broad agreement that modernity presents differently across time, borders, and the boundaries of scholarly fields, there is renewed interest in describing the particularities of the Australian experience of modernity in this period. Australia is singular in that the act of Federation in 1901 and the ensuing process of nation building provided a twist to the narrative of global developments in communication, science, economics, and politics that changed society and culture following the First World War. Although Australia became part of the broader narrative of modernity that was linear and focussed on progress, rationalisation, and modernisation, recent scholarly work has disputed the coherence of former accounts of modernity in relation to Australia. This chapter reflects on divergent scholarly accounts of modernity and offers a further framework, being eugenicist policies and practice, for understanding the complexities of this period. International scholars have commented on the divergence of approach in relation to modernity. In 2000 Shmuel Eisenstadt, for example, argued for a process of ‘multiple modernities’ (1) that refutes the Western homogenisation of the process of modernity: ‘Western patterns of modernity are not the only “authentic” modernities, although they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic point of reference for others’ (3). In what Eisenstadt calls ‘new types of collective identity’ (18), many localised identities moved into the centre of their respective societies. Eisenstadt identifies that one of the critical processes that emerges in this transnational flux is the capacity for reflexivity, so that the capacity for ‘self-correction’ and the ability to confront problems ‘not even imagined in its original program’ is core to the continuing process of modernity (25). This idea implies that linear historical progression experiences disruption, after which modernity reforms in another mode. My approach to tracing these disruptions, and therefore complicating understandings of modernity, is to examine the influence of the global circulation of eugenicist ideals and practices on Australian cultural platforms such as literature and the ways in which writers, notably Eleanor Dark and Christina Stead, engaged with this challenge. Eugenics functions in this schema as a cultural conductor of key questions across science, education, politics, health, and literary culture in early twentieth-century Australia. As stated, histories of Australian modernity and accounts of the influence of eugenics on Australia have each generated a range of divergent critical approaches. John Williams’s The Quarantined Culture (1994) argues that the sidelining of modernism in Australia was a reaction against 47

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a modernity that was culturally based, and that one of the markers of this reaction was its masculinism (6). In 2005 I wrote of ‘geo-modernism’ as a local variant approach to thinking about new forms of Australian cultural production. In 2013 Saïd Amir Arjomand and Elisa Reis argued for the importance of Raewyn Connell’s proposal that the ‘concept of multiple modernities, though useful, is not enough’ (2). Connell, who addresses Australian writing and in particular the work of Christina Stead, suggests that Australia is shaped by settler colonialism (qtd in Arjomand and Reis 2) rather than being a product of the multiple modernities approach that focusses on the dissemination of modernity from the metropole. David Carter, in 2016, said that ‘a model of cultural transference and transformation is more useful in describing this pattern than cultural evolution or “becoming”’ (14) as described in some literary histories of Australia. Regardless of whether Australian modernity can now be read as ‘multiple,’ following Eisenstadt, or as a product of colonisation, as per Connell, or a mode of transference as described by Carter, writers and artists in the interwar years especially were reflecting on rapidly changing political and social pressures and they were beginning to contest normative accounts of progress. For writers such as Dark and Stead, one aspect of this contestation was the inclusion in their work of fictional families who are suffering the strains of modern life. The authors investigate the failure of rationalised responses to life’s events in narratives that refer at length to the contemporaneous policies and practices of eugenics. Although subservient to national socioeconomic and cultural agendas, eugenics in the early years of the twentieth century was a powerful transnational discourse that connected women, and men, across national and regional borders. Donald Childs observes that the need for the inclusion of a history of eugenics is a ‘prerequisite to any attempt to appreciate a literary consciousness informed by the eugenics of the early years of the twentieth century’ (20). Other recent studies have shown how governments in the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, and Australia co-opted eugenicist ideals in the service of modernity. Fae Brauer argues that eugenics had a powerful ‘seductive appeal’ for the arts as well as for governments (4). Gisela Kaplan states that eugenics was ‘probably one of the very first ideologies that generated global support, because it was ‘was quintessentially European, entirely respectable’ (19). Australian women writers were at the forefront of a questioning of eugenicist concepts that were often promoted as part of post-Federation nationhood. In this context the writing of Dark and Stead, and in particular their early novels, provides a valuable exemplar of the cultural and political issues at stake and the way in which these authors sought to challenge the discourse of modernity through their interrogation of the ‘eugenical turn.’

The Eugenical Turn The first half of the twentieth century has been described as the ‘age of eugenics’ (Watts 319), although scholars hold different points of view on the mechanisms by which eugenics became powerful. Ross L. Jones states that ‘there was never any attempt by any Australian intellectual circle to produce an Australian version of eugenic theory’ (‘Removing Some of the Dust’ 78), proposing instead that European ideas were easily ‘diffused’ into the Australian environment. Jones agrees with Warwick Anderson’s comments that ‘the geography and climate of Australia were central to the uncertainty about race from the middle of the nineteenth century until at least the 1930s and developed alongside, rather than because of, the growing interest in eugenic theory’ (qtd in Jones 76). Jones continues: ‘In part, the word “eugenics” was deployed to modernise an older obsession with the perceived strangeness of the Antipodean environment and its possible negative effects on the development of the race’ (77). However, Diana Wyndham argues that the exceptional geopolitical position of Australia supports a regional response, stating that an ‘Australian’ version of eugenics became apparent, even if it was largely derivative (ii). 48

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In this environment, the movement of eugenics into literary culture was to be expected. Isobel Crombie states that because eugenics was a topic that engaged with fundamental human issues such as sex, health, race, and culture ‘it is not surprising that it entered the creative imagination in literary publications in the interwar period’ (41). One Australian writer, Catherine Helen Spence, had addressed these issues in her nineteenth-century novel Handfasted (1879) which is often described as ‘science-fiction.’ In their early work Dark and Stead experimented with literary conventions but even more importantly for the purposes of this discussion, they included eugenics discourses as a way of situating their fiction at the fulcrum of contemporary culture and putting sex on the literary agenda. In so doing they joined a tradition of left-wing writers who connected with eugenicist views through fiction. Donald Childs claims that even ‘socialist feminists’ could find a point of contact with eugenics (9) and suggests the characters of Lady Brunton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard Dalloway form a ‘eugenical subtext’ (38) in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Woolf, says Childs, demonstrates an interesting ambivalence as she ‘declines to indicate that she regards such eugenical assumptions [about feeblemindedness] as wrong’ (45). Further, however much ‘damage’ Woolf inflicts on eugenical values in Mrs Dalloway, Childs says that Woolf ‘continues discursively to circulate them’ (56). For Childs, Woolf ’s eugenic beliefs are bound up with matters of sexual activity, procreation, and a respect for nature (69), demonstrated in ‘her awareness that [Marie] Stopes is the agent of both liberation and promiscuity’ (71). Woolf ’s complex response, as proposed by Childs, indicates the way in which writers attempted to assess the impact of eugenics.

Family Relations: Dark and Stead Dark was well placed to comment on eugenics. Her aunt, Marion Piddington, was a follower of Stopes, a British writer, scientist, and campaigner for eugenics who founded the first birth control clinic in the United Kingdom in 1921, and Margaret Sanger, an American writer and birth control activist. Piddington was involved in the New South Wales Racial Hygiene Association (founded in 1926), an organisation with links to the Eugenics Education Society in London. Dark’s biographer, Barbara Brooks, identifies the familial relationships that may have influenced Dark’s fictional representation of eugenics. Piddington established the Institute for Family Relations in Sydney and offered classes on ‘the economic conditions of family life, sex habits, sterilisation and segregation, birth control’ (Brooks 116). John Cumpston records that the New South Wales Hygiene Association proposed that health certificates be made a legal requirement for marriage and that individuals who suffered from syphilis or epilepsy, or who were intellectually handicapped, should be prevented from marrying and so passing on their lack of ‘racial fitness’ (145). Many of these extreme proposals never became part of health policy, but the discourse continued to circulate in this period. Dark and Stead would have been fully aware of the social and political concern about ‘mental deficiency’ in Sydney in the 1920s and the relationship to eugenics that Ross Jones describes above. Dark grew up in a middle-class intellectual family who had government connections. Her husband, Eric Dark, was a medical practitioner who promoted nationalised medicine and led community-based health campaigns. Stead, who left Australia in 1927, was the daughter of a wellknown Australian naturalist and conservationist, David George Stead. She also worked for a time as a research assistant in psychology at a Sydney teachers’ college and was interested in psychology, despite her later insistence on the primacy of literary naturalism in her work. Christina famously attributed eugenicist views to the character of Sam Pollit, based on her father David Stead, in The Man Who Loved Children (1940). Both Dark and Stead provide an imaginative response to the relationship of health, science, and modernity in their early fiction. In Dark’s Slow Dawning, the character of Valerie Spencer, a female 49

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doctor, dreams of a future ‘army’ of women. Valerie says: ‘But there are no – facilities – for me, as there are for any drunken labourer who likes to carry syphilis from a prostitute to infect his wife and unborn children’ (91). Valerie’s examination of parental responsibility is strikingly similar to the comments of the young unwed mother, Bonnie Pollit, in Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, who says she has sent her former lover packing on the basis of ‘better no father than such a wretch’ (520). In Dark’s Prelude to Christopher (1934) the author explicitly engages with eugenics. The characters in the book represent a range of eugenicist principles, none of which are found to be viable by the end of the novel. The problematic attraction of eugenics for the medical sciences, and the way in which government policy can be influenced subsequently, is made clear. The compassionate protagonist Dr Nigel Hendon, a war hero, reads The Psychology of Sex and The Science of Eugenics and dreams of founding a community on an island dedicated to ‘the rearing of healthy children from untainted stock’ (43). Hendon establishes a colony based on positive eugenics on a Pacific island, Hy-brazil, a social experiment that fails. But on his return to general practice another doctor indicates that the problem of the ‘unfit’ has not gone away, stating that the ‘breeding of the unfit must stop somewhere – someday’ (274). Nigel himself is rescued from a dismal future by the suicide of his wife Linda. Although Brooks draws attention to the ways in which Dark is ‘critical of science and technology, suspicious of “progress”’ in this novel (188), Dark makes clear that not all science is suspect. The compassionate Nigel realises that his eugenicist plan is a failure and he settles for a future in a socially acceptable life as a country doctor. Unlike her literary contemporaries Christina Stead, Jean Devanny, and Kylie Tennant, Dark limits her critique so that, as Crombie argues in relation to Prelude to Christopher, the ‘normative values of family, children and work are suggested as the ideal social form, while the dangers of blurring gender roles through female education and emancipation are given tragic form in the character of the mad wife [Linda Hendon]’ (42). Both Dark and Stead use visual representations of women characters to signify psychological instability but their solution to the problem of illhealth is quite different. At one point in Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) two of the ‘poor men’ look at a drawing in which Catherine Baguenault is depicted naked while attempting to escape from the plant and animal life of a tropical forest. Joseph Baguenault, Catherine’s cousin, says it is ‘Queer’ (155) but there is no further condemnation of Catherine’s activities. In Prelude to Christopher Dark’s narrator is initially sympathetic to the character of the unstable Linda but less so towards the end of the novel. Linda shows a painting of herself to the young Dr Marlow who reacts with horror at the depiction of Linda among the trees and vines on the eugenics settlement on Hy-Brazil, seeing the ‘psychological nakedness’ of Linda as a depiction of ‘outcast uncleanliness’ (106). Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney was published in the United Kingdom in the same year as Dark’s Prelude to Christopher was published in Australia. The novels express a common interest in, and challenge to, the prevailing national dialogue about population control and purity and the best means to ensure a healthy society in modern Australia. However, whereas Stead supports a life of non-compliance for Catherine, Dark’s Linda finally commits suicide and the disrupted world is thereby set to rights.

Cathedrals of Science In Seven Poor Men of Sydney, contemporary Sydney is depicted as a world city in a transnational system of communications. Meg Brayshaw argues that the small publishing company at the centre of Stead’s novel is ‘linked to the city, the city to the nation, and all are enveloped in a narrative of progress through rational thinking and practical science’ (10). Dorothy Green wrote of Stead’s style that ‘it was Seven Poor Men of Sydney, rather than any early Patrick White novel, which broke free from kitchen-sink realism into the world of poetry, without losing touch with the ground’ (qtd in Rowley 130). Stead’s imagery ranges from poetic visions to a mix of naturalism 50

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and realism. In the novel Joseph Bagenault listens to a lecture on the chemistry of light and visualises the chemistry as an ‘internal cathedral’ (42). Sam Matthews states that these lessons explore …how literary modernism might take root (or do something else entirely) in Sydney, Australia … [so that] Stead’s interest in relativity speaks not only to Seven Poor Men’s radical deterritorialising of national space and time, but … is also indicative of this novel’s bold and ‘eccentric’ vision of modernism from the other side. (2; original emphasis) Stead described herself as a ‘naturalist’ in her approach to both science and writing: ‘I was brought up by a naturalist,’ she maintained, ‘and I am a naturalist’ (qtd in Harris), but she engaged with modernism’s interest in psychiatry and mental illness, in particular through the character of Catherine Bagenault. Dorothy Green argued that Catherine ‘is the real centre of the book and it is her predicament as a woman, and as a woman who has come to maturity in Australia that is the seed from which the book grows’ (qtd in Ferrier 1). Catherine should mature in step with the growth of modern Australia but her decision to undertake psychoanalysis and later to admit herself to a Sydney asylum complicates the narrative of national health and progress. Catherine’s modernity is her refusal to adopt normative social behaviour and she succeeds in her bid for survival by using the asylum for recuperation. She reflects on her social and political position and develops her own contract with the forces of modernity. Fiona Morrison reads Seven Poor Men as ‘an example of vernacular modernism, a radical mode emerging from and acting with regional and colonial modernity’ (9), a standpoint that would connect with Connell’s ‘settler colonialism’ approach to modernity in Australia. However, Stead has Catherine stand aside from nationalist debates. In The Man Who Loved Children Stead engages explicitly with eugenics and race through the character of Sam Pollit. Sam educates his daughter Louisa with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Georges Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom (1817) and numerous works in biology and psychology (381). Yet Louisa still has little understanding of sexual relations, which the narrator labels ‘sexual commerce’ (379). Sam, who is described by the narrator as a man who is ‘gifted and possessed’ (114), argues that: …suicide should be recognised and permitted, for a person was captain of his own life. Murder of the unfit, incurable, and insane should be permitted. Children born mentally deficient or diseased should be murdered, and none of these murders would really be a crime, for the community was benefited, and the good of the whole was the aim of all, or should be. (135) Sam tells Louisa, ‘Why, we might murder thousands – not indiscriminately as in war now – but picking out the unfit and putting them painlessly into the lethal chamber. This alone would benefit mankind by clearing the way for a eugenic race’ (135). Sam’s choice of language is instructive. Stead, whose partner William Blake was a Jewish banker and writer, lived in a number of European cities in the 1930s, and she must have known of the concentration camps in Europe, first established in 1933. Sam’s eugenicist theories ensure that he is a deeply problematic figure when he is sent on a scientific mission to Malaya. The narrator describes Sam as ‘still labouring to bring the ideas of the west to the cultured Indian, including ideas “for preserving man’s seed in tubes and fertilising selected mothers”’ (216), while Sam is oblivious to his own racism. As a safeguard against venereal disease Sam advises Louisa to demand a medical certificate before marriage – which she instantly dismisses on the grounds that it is ‘silly’ because ‘she knows only love’ (478). However, whereas Stead chooses a life of non-compliance for Catherine in Seven Poor Men of Sydney and for Louisa in The Man Who Loved Children, Dark’s literary response is more 51

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conventional. The character Linda kills herself, thus enabling her husband to marry Kay, who will produce a ‘normal’ family. Paul Turnbull remarks that it was in the interwar years that eugenic solutions to white pathologies ‘seem to have had most appeal’ (167). When Dark began writing Prelude to Christopher in 1930 she was writing into a highly racialised atmosphere. Dark’s novel thus ‘picks up on a strand of utopian thought in Australian nationalism’ because the ‘ideas around eugenics connected with the arguments of science, nationalism and feminism at the time. Ideas of progress, of improvement in social conditions, were part of eugenics, as they were part of both capitalism and socialism’ (Brooks 188). In the two-year period in which Stead wrote The Man Who Loved Children she and Bill Blake moved to New York and read reports of war in Europe. Rowley records that Stead was disappointed at the slow sales of the novel, saying that publishers Simon and Schuster were doing little to publicise the work: ‘S & S are disgusted with the book and are doing nothing for it. I should have called it How to Have Children and Generate People … I am quitting them’ (qtd in Rowley 270). In so saying, Stead acknowledges the difficulties of her fictional challenge to the impact of eugenics and as well to the conventional narrative of national progress of which a productive and harmonious family is the foundation. Angela Wanhalla says that ‘the notion of reform underpinned eugenic ideals and bound together disparate groups with varying social agendas in the first half of the twentieth century’ (164–165). The Second World War seemingly broke those bonds and debates about reform and progress assumed new directions. In the literary context Dark focussed on writing historical novels in which issues of race were and purity of population were interrogated in narratives of colonisation. Stead’s fiction examined contemporary social and political problems in Europe and America and race was subsumed by the challenges of class and capitalism. It is not surprising therefore that, as Jane Carey argues, ‘the full reach and diversity of eugenics also remains under-recognised in feminist scholarship’ (735). However, the study of the operations of eugenics illustrates the way in which varying global and regional modernities intersect across science, education, politics, health, and culture. The discourse was disseminated from the metropole (largely those centres in Europe and the United States) and for a time became a powerful framework for continuing colonisation and the desire for a healthy nation state. The discourse now provides a basis for reflection on early twentieth-century modernity. Readers of interwar women writers were warned however about the limits of progress for the nation state, as depicted in the corruption that infects their fictious families. Modernity in this period was not only the linear achievements celebrated in historical accounts but also a process of questioning and disrupting those historical moments, seen here in the eugenical turn.

Works Cited Anderson, Warwick. The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2002. Arjomand, Amir Säid, and Elisa Reis, ed. Worlds of Difference. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013. Blackford, Russell, Van Ikin, and Sean McMullen. Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Brauer, Fae. ‘Making Eugenic Bodies Delectable: Art, “Biopower” and “Scientia Sexualis.”’ Art, Sex and Eugenics. Ed. Brauer and Callen. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008. 1–34. Brauer, Fae, and Anthea Callen, ed. Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008. Brayshaw, Megan. ‘The Tank Stream Press: Urban Modernity and Cultural Life in Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney.’ Australian Literary Studies 31.6 (2016): 1–15. Brooks, Barbara, with Judith Clark. Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1998. Carey, Jane. ‘The Racial Imperatives of Sex: Birth Control and Eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in the Interwar Years.’ Women’s History Review 21.5 (2012): 733–752. Carson, Susan J. ‘Finding hy-Brazil: Eugenics and Modernism in the Pacific.’ Hecate 35.1/2 (2009): 124–133.

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Modernity in Australia Carter, David. Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. Childs, Donald J. Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Connell, Raewyn. ‘The Shores of the Southern Ocean: Steps toward a World Sociology of Modernity, with Australian Examples.’ Arjomand and Reis, Worlds of Difference. 58–72. Crombie, Isobel. Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919–1939. Melbourne: Images/National Gallery of Victoria, 2004. Crotty, Martin, John Germov, and Grant Rodwell, ed. A Race for a Place: Eugenics, Darwinism and Social Thought and Practice in Australia. Newcastle, NSW: U of Newcastle P, 2000. Cumpston, John Howard Lidgett. Health and Disease in Australia: A History. 1928. Canberra, ACT: Australian Government Publishing, 1989. Dark, Eleanor. Slow Dawning. London: John Long, 1932. ———. Waterway. 1938. North Ryde, NSW: Collins/Angus and Robertson, 1990. ———. Return to Coolami. 1936. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1991. ———. Prelude to Christopher. 1934. Sydney, NSW: Halstead, 1999. Eisenstadt, S.N. ‘Multiple Modernities.’ Daedalus 129.1 (2000): 1–29. Featherstone, Lisa. ‘Race for Reproduction: The Gendering of Eugenic Theories in Australia, 1890–1940.’ Crotty, Germov, and Rodwell, A Race for a Place.181–188. Ferrier, Carole. ‘Christina Stead’s Poor Women of Sydney, Travelling into Our Times.’ JASAL 15.3 (2015): 1–16. Harris, Margaret. ‘Stead, Christina Ellen, 1902–1983.’ Australian Dictionary of Biography 18. 2012. . Jones, Ross L. ‘Review.’ Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60.2 (2005): 239–41. ———. ‘Removing Some of the Dust from the Wheels of Civilisation: William Ernest Jones and the 1928 Commonwealth Survey of Mental Deficiency.’ Australian Historical Studies 40.1 (2009): 63–78. Kaplan, Gisela. ‘European Respectability, Eugenics, and Globalisation.’ Crotty, Germov and Rodwell, A Race for a Place. 9–18. Matthews, Sam. ‘Lights All Askew in the Heavens’: Einsteinian Relativity, Literary Modernism and the Lecture on Light in Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney.’ Australian Literary Studies 31.6 (2016): 1–19. Moore, Nicole. ‘Treasonous Sex: Birth Control Obscenity Censorship and White Australia.’ Australian Feminist Studies 20.48 (2005): 336–342. Morrison, Fiona. ‘Modernist/Provincial/Pacific: Katherine Mansfield, Christina Stead and Expatriate Home Ground.’ JASAL 13.2 (2013): 1–12. . Piddington, Marion. Tell Them! or the Second Stage of Mothercraft. Sydney, NSW: Moore’s, 1926. Rodwell, Grant, ‘“Persons of Lax Morality”: Temperance, Eugenics and Education in Australia, 1900–30.’ Journal of Australian Studies 64 (2000): 62–74. Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead: A Biography. Sydney, NSW: William Heinemann, 1993. Stead, Christina. Letty Fox: Her Luck. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946. ———. The Man Who Loved Children. 1940. New York: Holt, Rinehardt and Winston, 1968. ———. Seven Poor Men of Sydney. 1934. Melbourne, VIC: Miegunyah, 2015. Turnbull, Paul, et al. ‘Australia’s Heart of Darkness.’ Metascience 12.153 (2003): 153–175. Wanhalla, Angela. ‘“To Better the Breed of Men”: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1900–1935.’ Women’s History Review 16.2 (2007): 163–182. Watts, Rob. ‘Beyond Nature and Nurture: Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Australian History.’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 40 (1994): 318–334. Williams, John F. The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Wyndham, Diana. Eugenics in Australia: Striving for National Fitness. London: Galton Institute, 2003.

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6 AMONG THE AUTUMN AUTHORS Books and Writers in Interwar Australian Magazines Sarah Galletly and Victoria Kuttainen

Commercial magazines have often been regarded as enemies of literature and organs of the mass market, especially during the interwar period, an era that has until recently (Carter, Always; Kuttainen, Liebich, and Galletly) been dismissed as ‘the saddest phase of Australian culture’ (Wallace-Crabbe 51). A relatively large number of mainstream magazines were launched in Australia in the 1920s, and among the few that managed to survive the unsteady Depression years (Greenop 234–235), the well-capitalised publications of high production quality may be reappraised for their affirmative relationship to Australian literary culture. This chapter explores the ways in which the literary features of The Home (1920–1942) and The BP Magazine (1928–1942) played a small but significant role in introducing their readers to new, established, or seasonal Australian writers and their work in an era when the publishing industry in this country was still profoundly underdeveloped. Aside from drawing their readers’ attention to contemporary Australian literature through their literary features and the stories selected for publication within their pages, these magazines positioned Australian writers and their writing amid current authors and books from Britain, America, and elsewhere. The fact that literary production from England still shaped and dominated Australian reading tastes did not always signal a colonial ‘cultural cringe’ (Phillips), as has often been assumed. Rather, as David Carter has observed in relation to other aspects of interwar Australian culture (Always 17, 155), these magazines reviewed Australian books and discussed Australian writers in ways that positioned them within the currents of international modernity. While critics like Nettie and Vance Palmer secured a more vibrant scene for Australian publishing by promoting cultural nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s, it may be the case that this retrospective understanding of Australian literature has occluded a more cosmopolitan, middlebrow perspective of Australian books and writers of the interwar era. While an interest in Australian books and writers emerges in the pages of these magazines, so too does the insight offered by Patrick Buckridge and Eleanor Morecroft that ‘Australian readers could gain wider and easier access to past and current world literature’ than ever before, and ‘the idea that Australians needed to read and think more globally was variously articulated through this period’ (49, 51). Moreover, efforts to establish a canon of Australian literature may have obscured the way in which Australian writers – and magazines – were engaged with their own contemporaneity. Carter has further argued that ‘on the cusp of the formation of a mass-mediated public sphere and the first decade in Australia “after” modernism’ magazines played an instrumental role in negotiating a series of shifts: establishing ‘new ways of talking,’ and trying out new ways ‘of conceiving audiences and authors; and of articulating a relation to modernity’ (‘Magazine’ 73, 75). Quality magazines such as 54

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The Home and The BP Magazine appealed to readers who wished to appear worldly and up-to-date. While author features and book reviews by no means dominated these magazines, they nonetheless signalled the books and writers their target readerships should like to know. Addressing a largely female, upper- and middle-class audience, The Home was launched by Sydney Ure Smith into a fast-changing post-war world in February 1920, with Ure Smith as art editor and Bertram Stevens, followed by Leon Gellert, as literary editor (Docker 118). Initially foregrounding the latest trends in art, society, and design, The Home settled into a more typical women’s magazine format following its sale to the newspaper conglomerate Fairfax in 1934. In its own words, The Home was ‘Australia’s de luxe periodical of general interest,’ selling initially for two shillings and sixpence and for two shillings after 1926. At its height, print runs reached a modest 7,500 (compared to 126,000 copies of the mass magazine Australian Woman’s Mirror sold in 1928 [Underhill 200]), but its exclusiveness was part of its cachet. The magazine fostered a number of Australian writers’ careers, publishing serialised and short fiction from Katharine Susannah Prichard, Marjorie Barnard, Hugh McCrae, Myra Morris, David Unaipon, and D. Lindsay Thompson, often illustrated by prominent commercial artists such as Thea Proctor, Hera Roberts, and Adrian Feint. The BP Magazine was launched in 1928 by the Australian shipping outfit Burns, Philp & Co, as an outgrowth of the firm’s promotional pamphlet Picturesque Travel, and was one of the few Australian magazines of this era to be under the command of a female editor, Dora Payter. With the financial backing of its mother company facilitating high production values more typical of expensive imported periodicals, it rose to become a bonafide quality magazine. Appearing quarterly and selling initially for one shilling and sixpence (1928), then two shillings (1929), before dropping to one shilling (1930–1942), the publication was aimed at readers who travelled, or aspired to. The BP Magazine foregrounded the world of a colonial elite, appealing to male and female consumers of aspirational as well as firmly upper-class backgrounds. It addressed both urban readers and those residing in rural and tropical Australia, as well as pastoralists and planters serviced by Burns Philp’s liner routes. Authors such as Hilary Lofting, Margaret Fane, Jean Devanny, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Kurt Offenburg, and Jessie Urquhart contributed stories and features, lavishly illustrated by artists such as Walter Jardine and Frances (Frank) Payne.

Writers You Should Know In the interwar period when these periodicals were in circulation, a growing celebrity culture was in evidence in magazines, and emerged as one of their key selling points. As Matthew Hannah has argued, even prestigious modernist literary reviews capitalised on the expanding culture of celebrity, although they navigated their relationship with fame and publicity in carefully deployed ways (224). Fashionable mid-range magazines imported from America and England, such as Vanity Fair and Vogue, became ‘vehicles of the expanding culture of celebrity, featuring many portraits of successful artists and entertainers, as well as nominations for the hall of fame,’ which could be ‘reconciled with the sophisticated ethos’ of their ‘quality commercial platforms’ (Hammill 12). Australian publications that emulated quality magazines from overseas played a key role in mediating international and Australian celebrity in the arts and literature (Carter, ‘Conditions’). Each of these magazines approached fame in ways that reflected their editorial remit and market niche, and the approaches they took positioned Australian writers and their books in different ways.

The Home As a securely upmarket publication, The Home attempted to appeal to ‘both old money’ and ‘an emerging professional managerial class’ (Carter, Always 137). With this readership in mind, The Home was slightly more conservative in its approach to artistic fame in general – and literary 55

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fame in particular – than magazines more firmly directed towards the mass market. This careful approach was part of what marked the publication as a taste-making magazine for aspirational readers. In its early years, The Home was sceptical of, and shied away from, publicity-conferred fame that promoted figures from stage or film into the limelight (September 1920, 20, 47). Literary editor Bertram Stevens feared the day when ‘the cinema-plus-gramophone may be raised to the nth power and supersede all other forms of entertainment and instruction’ ( June 1920, 36). Mindful of their securely upmarket readership, The Home sought to avoid boosterish promotion and reported instead on writers of secure reputation. In the mid-1920s the recurring feature ‘Famous Visitors to Australia’ served this purpose by including, among other famous men of accomplishment long dead, profiles of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson ( June 1926), Anthony Trollope (August 1926), and Joseph Conrad (December 1926). An occasional item such as ‘Distinguished Australian Writers and Artists’ drew attention to writers of assured distinction and achievement, such as Dr Archibald Strong, whose achievements are secured by a DLitt and publication from Oxford, or Hugh McCrae, whose poetry has ‘won high praise from those who appreciate poetry for its own sake’ (September 1920, 10). Regular features filed from overseas by Australian journalist Freda Sternberg cement the impression, in the early years of The Home, that literary celebrity was still at this time a fascinating overseas phenomenon. Sternberg reports on the scale of international literary celebrity she encounters in New York City with a sense of effusive awe (February 1920, 7), and chronicles for an interested reader of The Home the celebrity authors she encounters in her travels. ‘At Montreal I met my first celebrity – Stephen Leacock’ Sternberg beams, calling him ‘most human and delightful’ (September 1920, 48). Washington Square, she adds, is where ‘most of the literary celebrities’ could be found in New York, including familiar names from the Saturday Evening Post – Frank Norris, Jack London, and James Forbes (September 1920, 48–49). The publication’s aversion to promotion, rather than their lack of commitment to Australian writing, may have influenced The Home to steer away from presenting emerging Australian writers whose prestige was less secure or record of achievements was unstable. As The Home begins to introduce emerging Australian writers in ways framed by these overseas models of literary celebrity, it continues to appeal to the language of achievement and prestige, as in Arthur Jusef ’s profile of ‘Winifred Shaw, Australia’s Youngest Poet’ in March 1923 (90). In the late 1920s, however, The Home’s ambivalence towards modern fame in general, and literary celebrity in particular, begins to shift into acceptance. In one indicative feature, Jane Mander’s interview with Henry Handel Richardson, the sense that literary fame must first be won overseas is presented as a deficit in Australian society: It is an old truism that artists, like prophets, have little honour in their own countries till they have been discovered and boosted in other lands. And so, I was not unduly surprised years ago, on coming from New York to London, to find that none of the Australian journalists I met had ever heard of their woman author, ‘Henry Handel Richardson’ or her first remarkable novel, Maurice Guest. ( June 1929, 28) Even so, Mander obliquely praises the writer for her avoidance of promotion: She has never sought publicity. She still wishes to be known to the world only by her professional name. And in any case her novel was not likely to popularise her with the average fiction reader, nor did it identify her with anything Australian. But we did know about her in New York, those of us who prided ourselves on never missing significant stuff. (28) 56

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Notably, it is the ‘quality of criticism that Ultima Thule has received’ that impresses Mander more than the wide readership the author has won (28). Moreover, Richardson’s discerning intellect is deemed worthy of attention for readers of The Home, ranking her among the greatest world writers in English: I can only hope that for their own sakes her fellow countrymen will now read all her books, and be proud of her as an Australian author who can be put in that front line with Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy ( June 1929, 72). Throughout the interwar period, The Home’s Caleb Mortimer heaped satirical criticism upon writers such as London’s Ethel Mannin, who is portrayed as being known for her fame rather than her talent ( June 1933, 37), and reserved his highest praise for literary ‘opponents of mobthinking’ (November 1928, 26). Even so, a gradual softening towards notions of literary celebrity occurs. While the social items in The Home mostly feature socialites and artists, contemporary Australian writers do begin to appear in them, including Mary Mack (February 1927, 4) and Dale Collins (March 1930, 10). In general, however, The Home’s longer interview features, presented by London correspondent Derek Patmore, focus on well-known English writers – Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Noel Coward (February, March, May 1934 respectively). While The Home softened their initial stance against fame as promotional boosterism, the publication preferred to feature writers of secure esteem, generally from overseas.

The BP Magazine In contrast to The Home, which valued established writers of known achievement and staged their representation of authors with considerable care and framing, The BP Magazine cheerily presented any rank of contemporary Australian author as a minor celebrity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, BP mainly profiled authors who travelled, and glamour, mobility, and gossip characterised the magazine’s presentation of them. Social gossip features with titles such as ‘In the Public Eye,’ ‘Personalities of the Moment: At Home and Abroad,’ or ‘Travel Personalities and News’ reported on the stylish sojourns of Australian and New Zealand luminaries. These pages placed writers of varying classes alongside one another and in the company of other society figures of the day. Accompanied by portrait photographs, such features presented writers in ways influenced by the increasing interest in Hollywood celebrity. Newsy in their reportage of the comings and goings of authors and announcements of their imminent publications, readers were informed, for instance, that ‘Miss Christina E. Stead, the rising young Australian author, is at present residing in Paris. Two novels from her pen will be shortly published by a leading firm of British publishers, also some short stories’ ( June 1931, 41); that, ‘[t]ravelling by the Orient liner Ormonde, Miss Jessie Urquhart,’ a ‘well-known writer of short stories, serials and articles ... [who] has also had a novel published in Australia’ is now en route to Europe and ‘while aboard ship another novel will receive the finishing touches before reaching London’ while ‘[t]wo others are to be issued at an early date’ (March 1934, 17); or that ‘Miss Mona Gordon, the distinguished New Zealand writer, recently paid a short visit to Sydney when en route to London. Her second novel will be published shortly, her earlier book, “Torn Tapestry,” having met with considerable success’ ( June 1931, 41). The trans-Tasman travels of writers in the interwar period, as Helen Bones has noted, were also points of interest in these columns: ‘Mrs Jean Devanny, the New Zealand novelist who has come to Australia in search of a bigger background for her literary work, is now visiting’ (December 1929, 47). Success with overseas publishers was particularly newsworthy in these columns, just as The BP Magazine comfortably discussed and advised on matters of business success and international enterprise. These successes were reported with pride for the way in which Australian writers and their books were well-received overseas. For instance, in December 1933, The BP Magazine 57

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reports that ‘Messrs William Heinemann Ltd, of London, is publishing a novel by Miss Mary Mitchell, of Melbourne early in the New Year and advise that it is one of the best they have had in years’; further, ‘[i]t will be published in America also by Messrs Doubleday, Doran and Company of New York’ (17). The mobility of books often came hand in hand with the mobility of their authors. The ‘spectacular success’ of Mary Mitchell’s book is later noted, alongside her ‘plans to take a trip to Europe at an early date’ (March 1934, 17). At least until the mid-1930s, the cosmopolitanism of Australian writers mattered more and not less in the pages of this Australian magazine, and was at first not inconsonant with cultural nationalism (Carter, Always 13–44). By extension, the development of a national consciousness was described in similar terms as enhanced by travel. But as the 1930s wore on a separation of glamour, travel, literature, cosmopolitanism, and cultural nationalism visibly occurred in the pages of BP. Callboy’s ‘All the Arts’ column began to promote serious writers and local literary awards. From June 1932 until March 1937 this feature shared news about the Bulletin book prize, the Australian Literature Society Award, the Fellowship of Australian Writers, the Sydney Literary Society, Sydney and New Zealand PEN, and the various activities of Vance and Nettie Palmer. Winners of prestigious book awards appeared in the social gossip pages, such as Frank Davison whose novel Man-Shy ‘was selected as the best novel of the year’ by merit of winning the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society (September 1932, 20). By the late 1930s, the appearance of writers in these pages of BP became a rare occurrence, as the magazine shifted towards other sources of prestige than publication or travel alone. Each magazine outlined a different attitude towards literary celebrity, and this affected not only the kind of Australian writer the magazine showcased but also the way they were presented to the magazine’s target reader. While at first approaching literary fame as a curiosity from overseas and preferring to discuss established writers, largely from overseas, the slightly more upmarket and artsy The Home began to tentatively engage with Australian writers as celebrities. Conversely, the luxurious travel magazine BP began to focus on news about serious Australian writing as a form of cultural capital which their readers should care to acquire. As Robert Thomson and Leigh Dale have observed in their study of interwar newspaper reviews, Australian writers still occupied at this time a ‘lesser position in the scheme of things than their British counterparts’ (128), and this remains largely the case in these magazines. Nevertheless, celebrity features endeavoured to present news about Australian writers within the currents of international affairs. Book review items also aided readers in locating Australian writing which suited their tastes, and similarly positioned Australian books in an international marketplace.

New Books Worth Reading Melinda Harvey and Julieanne Lamond have rightly noted that ‘[u]ntil the institutionalisation of Australian Literature as a discipline in the academy from the mid-1950s, it was public critics, not academics, who were responsible for describing and evaluating the national literature.’ The book reviewers in these magazines positioned themselves as part of a shared class of discerning cultural consumers who were looking for casual recommendations about how to spend their leisure time. While demonstrating no particular sense of responsibility towards national literature, the act of reviewing Australian novels alongside books of their day from around the world similarly exposed readers to Australian books and framed particular ways of thinking about them.

The Home The Home’s book reviews were largely unsigned, or signed only by reviewers’ initials. Notable exceptions include reviews by Dora Wilcox (November 1926) and Lionel Lindsay ( July 1931), 58

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and a series of monthly reviews by Jean Curlewis (December 1926–March 1927). With less regard for ‘notions of tradition or permanence,’ these reviews focussed on directing readers ‘based upon forms of utility answering to specific needs’ (Carter, Always 154). Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s reviews bore titles such as ‘New Leaves for the New Year’ ( January 1926), ‘Among the Autumn Authors’ (May 1927), and ‘Five Books for February: A Menu to Appease the Literary Attitude for the Month’ (February 1927), linking seasonable fashion cycles to notions of reading taste. ‘New Books Worth Reading’ (October 1925) or ‘Some Books Worth Borrowing – And Some Worth Returning’ (May 1926) suggested an additional sorting function. Anchored to the rhythms of monthly or quarterly publication, they offered not only to keep readers abreast of the latest, but also to provide them with books that would suit a reader of their class and affirm their good taste. The parameters of what constituted a ‘worthwhile read’ were constantly shifting within the pages of The Home. In an early issue of the magazine, Bertram Stevens defends the need for serious reading, complaining that in this new age of mass production, too many authors are finding ‘the lure of popularity too strong’ and have given over to ‘the publishing machine’ for whom they are now ‘slaves’ to ‘so many thousand words a week.’ Even ‘worthy tradesmen’ have been seduced by ‘Mammon,’ Stevens worries (September 1920, 80). He then goes on to review a series of new releases, clearly delineating between ‘books of a more serious character,’ and those ‘books written for amusement only’ (82). A serious engagement with modern spy and thriller genres is therefore also evident in The Home’s review pages, even as the reader is tasked to discern the ‘better class’ of novel amid the ‘general scramble’: In an age when people of moderate intellect read Edgar Wallace unashamedly, and the word ‘thriller’ appears to have definitely entered the legitimate vocabularies of at least two great nations, it may not be amiss to direct the sensation seeker into that realm where the more dignified stylists operate. In the general scramble for the latest Edgar Wallace the better class of blood-chiller is apt to be overlooked and trodden underfoot by those who are not experimental in their search for excitement. (August 1930, 2) The reviewer dedicates considerable space to praise Francis Beeding’s recent novels, claiming they ‘represent the highest form of modern thriller in which the sensations of horror, suspense, and relief are treated with genuine humour and literary style’ (2). In his survey of ‘Book Reviewing in Newspapers, 1948–1978,’ John McLaren describes the relationship of the reviewer to the market, arguing that ‘[t]he reviewer is a publicist of the book, reporting on the state of letters as his journalistic colleagues report on other aspects of the state of the world’ (240). The tone of The Home’s review pages, announcing, for instance, that ‘C.E. Montague must be recognised as one of the cleverest of stylists at present writing English fiction’ (May 1926, 3), or that ‘[o]f all the contemporary novelists, Mr J.C. Snaith is the most variable in idea and literary style’ (February 1926, 6), constantly asserts the ‘contemporariness’ of authors under review. The Home also indicated its willingness to engage with the wide ‘world’ of print early on, though it should be noted that reviews still predominantly favoured British and American authors. ‘Choosing Your Fiction for March’ (March 1926, 3) recommends an almost equal balance of light fiction from Britain and America, from authors such as P.G. Wodehouse, Emily Post, Mary Borden, and P.C. Wren, author of Beau Geste (1924). Anglophile in taste, a willingness to explore American literature and take it seriously begins to appear in The Home. ‘In Print: Some Americans, Some Englishmen and a Prussian’ sardonically acknowledges that ‘[t]he book-lover who speculates on the latest American novel with the hope of finding literature runs as much risk as the average optimist who spends a few shillings on a ticket in a Tattersall’s sweep’ (September 1922, 5). Yet it ultimately affirms the increasing odds of finding good American writing: ‘[t]he 59

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investor who draws Moon-calf [by Floyd Dell] … wins a prize. This new book, by this new writer, marks another significant note in American fiction’ (5). Similarly, Australian writing increased in stature in these reviews. The Home regularly reviewed Australian authors alongside their British and American contemporaries. Helen Simpson’s Acquittal, signposted as being written ‘by an Australian,’ is favourably reviewed alongside Czech playwright Karel Capek’s Letters from England and Paul Morand’s Lewis and Irene (all 1925) which ‘brings a foreign flavour to current English literature’ (December 1925, 93). Australian author Erle Cox’s Out of the Silence (1925), while considered derivative of Wells and H. Rider Haggard, is deemed ‘original enough and interesting reading … far above the average standard of imported fanciful fiction’ ( January 1926, 3). Katharine Susannah Prichard’s new novel (1926) is positioned alongside new releases by Wells and Rose Macaulay, and highly praised: Working Bullocks is, I think, one of the most important, if not the most important book yet written by an Australian … Their [the protagonists’] story is simple, but it is alive, passionate, even exciting … But the book is more than a local story. The figures move, preoccupied as in real life with merely personal problems, but behind them like a classic frieze the working bullocks toil endlessly through the trees, symbol of all the labour, brute and human, of the world … Not the least interest of the book is the style which Miss Prichard has evolved. She has woven Australian slang, the names of bullocks and the names of wild flowers … into a curious style, rhythmic as verse but never lapsing into it, modern as any American experiment but never freakish, and apparently equally adaptable to gaiety and stark horror. (February 1927, 42) Notably, this review appeared in The Home while it was serialising Prichard’s The Wild Oats of Han prior to its book publication (1928). Further appreciation of emerging Australian literary culture appears in the ‘Book Reviews’ feature for October 1929, which is almost entirely given over to the review of two recent Australian novels ‘of very considerable consequence’: A House Is Built by M. Barnard Eldershaw and Coonardoo by Prichard (both 1929). Of the former, the reviewer observes ‘its obvious relation to the Galsworthy tradition,’ while Prichard is judged to be ‘a novelist of experience and one to whom literary prizes have come to be expected as items in the ordinary course of events’ (October 1929, 22). Not long after these book reviews begin to celebrate Australian novels more often and prominently, alongside established English authors and American books, they are cut short. By 1929, these general book review features are largely replaced by a series on ‘Recent French Books’ (1929–1930) conducted by professional reviewer, A.R. Chisholm, Professor of French at the University of Melbourne. This shift in title, orientation, and reviewer gestures towards the increasing professionalisation of book reviewing and literary expertise. Without according too much significance to the changes in the book reviewing format in the magazine, it is interesting to note that this particular change also signals a separation of world literature from emerging Australian writing.

The BP Magazine The need to maintain these distinctions was perhaps less pressing in The BP Magazine which outlined its intent, in its first editorial, to ‘cull from the Markets of the World the best in Literature and Art for the interest and entertainment of its readers’ (December 1928, 3). Anita Campbell’s ‘The Bookshelf’ (later simply ‘Books and Reviews’) suggested intimacy with the magazine reader and projected the latest cultural offerings into the home. Her ideal reader was represented in the section’s header illustration of a gentleman reclining in an armchair surrounded by books in his well-appointed domicile, affirming Campbell as the kind of reviewer McLaren has described as an ‘armchair observer,’ commenting on either ‘what was in the book’ or engaging in a ‘chat about the subject matter’ (241). 60

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Campbell’s reviewing style is conversational in tone, frequently addressing her fellow ‘book-lovers and other people of discernment’ directly. Her book-lover is a reader with ranging tastes; further, the standards of discernment Campbell applies align with a middlebrow approach of ‘invoking quality but distributing it much more widely than the canons of literary value’ (Carter, Always 166). Campbell is sure to draw her reader’s attention to books such as Crosbie Garstin’s The Dragon and the Lotus (1930), the tone of which ‘is a blessed relief from the usual type of travel book’ (March 1930, 40). But she is equally comfortable applying criticism to established authors as she promotes relatively unknown books to her reader’s attention, bemoaning J.B. Priestley for his tendency towards ‘wordy wanderings’ (September 1932, 62), and announcing that Pearl S. Buck’s The Young Revolutionist (1932) ‘does not come up to the standard of her former works’ ( June 1932, 62). Perhaps aligned with The BP Magazine’s equal commitment to culture and commerce, Ca mpbell appears to weigh the need for ‘literary achievement’ and ‘entertainment’ in equal value in her reviews, considering the reader’s requirement for entertainment more often and more earnestly than reviews in The Home. With Irish author Kate O’Brien’s Without My Cloak (1931), Campbell reminds the reader that it ‘was the Book Society’s choice for December last,’ before proclaiming that ‘[a]s a literary achievement it is monumental, and as an entertainment something which has not been excelled for some time’ ( June 1932, 62). Conversely, Storm Jameson’s latest (1932) ‘is so carefully constructed that the reader cannot but be conscious of the care,’ though they are warned that ‘[t]hose who consider that a novel’s first duty is entertainment will find That Was Yesterday a distinct disappointment’ (September 1932, 62). Australian authors appear in these reviews, but it is largely the case, as Thomson and Dale have observed of newspaper reviews, that ‘[t]his very proliferation of books paradoxically makes it more difficult for individual titles to stand out’ (140). Dorothy Cottrell’s Earth Battle (1930) (‘This is the sort of Australian book which will flatter us abroad’), and a reissue of Norman Lindsay’s Magic Pudding (1918) (‘quite a classic among children’s books’) appear alongside new releases by popular contemporary authors such as Rosamond Lehmann and Wren (December 1930, 56). On the same review page Campbell also praises Mary Gilmore’s The Wild Swan: Poems (1930), announcing it to be ‘[v]irile, loyal and courageous,’ before commenting that ‘anything so thoroughly Australian in sentiment and feeling must indeed be welcomed. The little volume is a well-timed blow at the persistent indifference to the importance of our writers’ (56). Boosting homegrown authors, even Judge George Beeby is welcomed as ‘as a worthy addition to the library of Australian authors’ for the ‘decidedly Wodehouse-ian flavour’ of his novel A Loaded Legacy (1930) (56). While The BP Magazine pointed to the growing stature of Australian writing in its ‘All the Arts’ column, book reviews at this time remained largely in the format of informal book chat, before becoming a far less regular feature of the magazine from 1935, and relegated to the back of the magazine with anonymous reviewers in 1937. Buckridge and Morecroft have reinforced the need for reappraising ‘[t]he particularity of an Australian reading perspective’ (50). Reading interwar Australian magazines for their affirmative relationships to Australian books provides even more granularity to this perspective, and adds nuance to previous deficit models focussed on emphasising the ways in which Australian literary culture was poorly developed prior to the rise of cultural nationalism, professional criticism, and a strong local publishing industry. Although The Home and The BP Magazine represent a similar tier of Australian print culture, as quality magazines they courted particular and segmented reading publics. Viewing these magazines in terms of their target readerships, and the ways in which books and writers were discussed within them, affords different perspectives on the canonical Australian books and authors presented in their pages alongside world authors of their day. Further, reading interwar Australian magazines for their affirmative relationships to Australian writers also provides ways of considering authors in relation to their own contemporaneity, and to the emerging models of modern literary fame adapted from overseas. The pages of these magazines force us to 61

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consider the varied and changing tastes of Australian reading publics, and allow us to submit less remembered books and writers that appear in their pages to different standards of assessment.

Works Cited Bones, Helen. The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World. Dunedin: Otago UP, 2018. Buckridge, Patrick, and Eleanor Morecroft. ‘Australia’s World Literature: Constructing Australia’s Global Reading Relations in the Interwar Period.’ Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Ed. Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney. North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. 47–59. Carter, David. ‘Magazine Culture: Notes Towards a History of Australian Periodical Publication, 1920– 1970.’ Australian Literature and the Public Sphere. Ed. Alison Bartlett, Robert Dixon, and Christopher Lee. Refereed Proceedings of the 1998 Conference. ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature), 1998. 69–79. . ———. Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity. North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. ———. ‘The Conditions of Fame: Literary Celebrity in Australia between the Wars.’ Journal of Modern Literature 39.1 (2015): 170–187. Docker, John. ‘Feminism, Modernism, and Orientalism in The Home in the 1920s.’ Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture. Ed. Ann Curthoys and Julianne Schultz. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1999. 117–130. Greenop, Frank. History of Magazine Publishing in Australia. Sydney, NSW: Murray, 1947. Hammill, Faye. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars. Austin: U of Texas P, 2007. Hannah, Matthew. ‘Photoplay, Literary Celebrity, and The Little Review.’ Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 5.2 (2015): 222–243. Harvey, Melinda, and Julieanne Lamond. ‘Taking the Measure of Gender Disparity in Australian Book Reviewing as a Field, 1985 and 2013.’ Australian Humanities Review 60 (2016). . Kuttainen, Victoria, Susann Liebich, and Sarah Galletly. The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity. New York: Cambria, 2018. McLaren, John. ‘Book Reviewing in Newspapers, 1948–1978.’ Cross Currents: Magazines and Newspapers in Australian Literature. Ed. Bruce Bennett. Melbourne, VIC: Longman Cheshire, 1981. 240–255. Phillips, AA. ‘The Cultural Cringe.’ Meanjin 9.4 (1950): 299–302. Thomson, Robert, and Leigh Dale. ‘Books in Selected Australian Newspapers, December 1930.’ Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture. Ed. Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2009. 119–141. Underhill, Nancy. Making Australian Art, 1916–49: Sydney Ure Smith, Patron and Publisher. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1991. Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. Melbourne or the Bush. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1974.

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7 ‘CATERPILLARS OF THE COMMONWEALTH’ Dangerous Books in Australia Francesca Rendle-Short Lolita should make all of us – parents, social workers, educators – apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world. (Ray 4) We are concerned about moral pollution of children through literature. (Knight 14) I felt I defiled my mind reading them. I needed a bath after it. (Hall and Hall 98) A friend sent me some excerpts from the books in question. I almost wish she hadn’t. They inspired me with an urgent desire for a bath. (Hood 2)

‘Dangerous Books in Australia’ begins in the early 1970s in Queensland, with a small but highly vocal protest group that set about agitating against what they saw as the ‘end of decency, morality and chastity, and the influx of spiritual chaos, lawlessness and wretchedness such as we have not experienced before’ (STOP PRESS, 1.2 1). Their protest centred in and around dangerous books, books ‘which are suspect’ (2), books they thought should be banned from school and university libraries, by government censors, books they thought should not be taught in high schools on the English curriculum. Books that should be burned rather than read. This protest group called themselves ‘STOP and CARE: The Society to Outlaw Pornography and Campaign Against Regressive Education.’ The writers and publishers of many of these [books] can best be described in the words of Shakespeare. They are ‘caterpillars of the Commonwealth.’ (Eighteenth Annual Report) This study brings together not simply the concerns of these minority pressure groups but the way in which groups such as STOP and CARE were successful in making their protest heard enough to influence public discourse when it came to the state of education and the reading and study of literature. Society To Outlaw Pornography Paper Reporting Extra Special Snippets (STOP PRESS, 1.2 2) 63

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It does so in the style or form in which STOP and CARE published their newsletters and pamphlets – bits and pieces of interest and notes threaded together in ‘toggle and weave’ such as snippets from archives, newspapers, journal articles, letters to the editor, Hansard recordings, committee hearings, and pages of extracts from books of interest taken out of context (underlining and capitalising important words and phrases), even an advertisement for the National Party in one edition, extolling the virtues of Premier Bjelke-Petersen (‘STOP AND CARE’), and an open letter from Lindy Chamberlain, beseeching members of STOP and CARE to pray for her – in order to present a picture of that very particular time in Australian social and cultural history, an idiosyncratic view of the politics of censorship at that time, and how this protest and counter-protest played itself out. It is typical of them to read only ‘excerpts’ from books, and from this to come to the conclusion that all is ‘garbage.’ One can only feel concerned for the children of such imperceptive parents, who it seems will ‘never never’ have much opportunity to develop their own set of values. (Greig 2) The form of this study is also in keeping with the publication trends of the day. For instance, Australian Censorship: The XYZ of Love brings together a reflection of the social mores and sensibilities of the time in a collection of facts and fictions. It is, as the introduction states, full of ‘snidery, sarcasm, cynicism, imbalance, injustices, inconsistencies, and the ridiculous. Much the same mixture, we think, describes the Australian censor’s attitude to sex’ (Hall and Hall 5). The form and style of XYZ of Love is a ‘scissors-and-paste process, essential in such a book’ (5). Its first entry, for example, sets the scene. A is for Adam who can never be forgiven for starting the whole damn thing. (7) Academics: The CIA of the anti-censorship movement working under the cover of respectability, passing intelligence between the higher reaches of government and the frontline troops (students, TV personalities, columnists, show business fringers etc) … [T]he wanted-for-private-study argument still doesn’t impress Customs. If they do let a scholar have a banned book they like to keep it under lock and key and retuned in a month. (8) STOP and CARE protested throughout the 1970s, their public views gaining considerable momentum in the community. They were influential on politicians and the politics of the day to the point of changing government policy and triggering a wide-ranging and unprecedented parliamentary inquiry. STOP, CARE & ACTS aim to: ** i)    ii) **

Protect children and teenagers from – all forms of moral danger, educational deprivation; and work towards truly quality education with a Christian pro-family basis. (‘A Brief History’ 1)

Their methods were multiple and various, and unrelenting: they sent out press releases, circulated regular newsletters, and Roneoed foolscap pages of ‘action sheets’ and facts and figures to support their claims. They were highly vocal at public meetings; visited Parliament House to persuade conservative politicians to support their views and be on their side; organised letter-writing bees to help their members write to members of parliament; and they became members of school Parents and Citizens Associations (P&Cs) in order to agitate for their views and influence school 64

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curriculum. The regular newsletter they distributed far and wide contained small bite-sized pieces of news, excerpts from books they were targeting, headlines in newspapers, bible verses, mini sermons dressed up as editorials, and ‘calls to arms.’ Dare we say we are not delinquent, when we allow authors, publishers and producers to flood our country and our culture with filth, designed to arouse and unnaturally excite passions. (STOP PRESS, 3.1 4; original emphasis) STOP and CARE were so successful in their campaigning that they were able to get numbers of books of literature banned in schools. In 1978, with the support of the Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, STOP and CARE managed to influence the banning of a primary school social studies course Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), which was developed in the United States, followed by the secondary social studies course the Social Education Materials Project (SEMP), developed by the Curriculum Development Centre in Australia. MACOS and SEMP were curriculum resource kits produced by a national curriculum authority. A controversial and highly publicised Parliamentary Inquiry into the education system in Queensland followed the dramatic banning of these two courses from all Queensland schools. I have never felt more clearly the actual responsibility of being a writer. (Shapcott qtd in Davidson 68) [I]n Queensland the experience of seeing how close a 1970s so-called ‘democracy’ can slither into outright fascism, with a terrifying complacency in the electorate, that’s to see how vulnerable our liberties are, and our freedom. (68) During this period, politics in Queensland and the provocative argument that politicians were protecting what they called ‘community standards’ were apparent everywhere: in the a nti-street march legislation, in the changes to tax law (a subject Australian novelist Thomas Shapcott explored in a play titled Pursuant to the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 as Amended (1978) [66]), the treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, the influence of conservative protest in the education system, and the banning of books and other curricula such as MACOS and SEMP. STOP and CARE were able to mount a carefully orchestrated campaign by saturating the Letters to the Editor columns in the local papers, including The Courier-Mail, and when ‘talkback’ radio first started broadcasting in Brisbane, by exploiting public admission to this accessible medium. STOP and CARE made their views known through these distinctly audible channels, to give the impression that ‘the community’ were behind them. [N]ovels filled with … descriptions, presented in obscene language … of swamps of perversions ranging from homosexuality, incest, sadism. (STOP ACTION SHEET 1) Queensland was thought of as being a wowser state, where killjoys get their own way (Bailey 2). Queenslanders liked to view themselves differently to the rest of Australia. As an Alan Moir cartoon of the time describes in a drawing of a map of Australia: there’s ‘THEM,’ referring to the other states of Australia, and ‘US’ – Queensland. In Australian Censorship: The XYZ of Love (1970), the letter Q reads: ‘Q is for Queensland where the reaction is’ (Hall and Hall 96). Below that entry a cartoon by illustrator Bettan has a man and woman looking at each other, pointing the finger. The man has a beer gut; the woman is dressed in a bikini. They are both saying in a speech bubble ‘you should be ashamed of yourself!’ the woman is thinking ‘the perve!’ The man: ‘the nerve!’ 65

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Instead of seeing man in the tradition of the West, as ‘a little lower than the angels,’ these twentieth-century writers have completed the revolt against Christian values, by dragging their readers downward to their own view of man as lower than any animal would naturally descend. (STOP ACTION SHEET 1) S.T.O.P. moral pollution Keep Australia morally clean Silence is not golden when it’s guilty. (STOP PRESS, 1.2 2) STOP and CARE, a ‘vigilante group’ to some in the community (Scott 125), was founded and directed by Mrs Rona Joyner, who was known as a ‘pornography crusader’ (Knight 14). Joyner was determined to protect Queensland’s schoolchildren from the ‘anti-Christian, anti-family, socialist-humanist “cells” active within the Education Department,’ where the language employed here of ‘good versus evil’ is similar to that of the Cold War anti-communism language (Campbell 6). In a report requested by the Quarterly General Meeting of the Australian Society of Authors in 1980 on this matter, Joyner was characterised as dangerous, and others of her ilk, only because they are so highly organised (she has two telephones at her home and sermonises on them when she is not composing and distributing her letters and leaflets) … ‘NO, we don’t want Rona on our backs.’ (Priest 3, 4) Joyner was joined by another ‘agitator’ Angel Rendle-Short, ‘mother of six children,’ who regularly appeared on talkback Open Line radio, wrote letters to the editor, made appearances in public meetings; and who also made a submission and presented for examination at the Ahern Inquiry in 1978 (one of approximately 90) being in frequent correspondence with the chairman. She was known in the press as an ‘anti-smut’ and ‘anti-pornography’ campaigner (‘Book Ban’ 7, ‘Free Love’ 12). She was vocal in protesting against the promotion of ‘contraceptive vending machines in schools and alternative lifestyles such as lesbianism and homosexuality’ (‘Radio Plan’ 8). BRISBANE, Sunday. – A group of Brisbane parents have begun a campaign to stamp out pornography, which they allege is available to children and was receiving good support from the churches in the area, Dr A.M. Rendle-Short, of St Lucia, said yesterday. (‘In Brief ’ 3) ‘The doctor,’ as Rendle-Short was often called, was part of a delegation of concerned parents to parliament in 1972. They presented a petition entitled Concerning the Moral Pollution of Children Through Literature that included a list of books they considered should be banned (Priest). There were notable typographical errors and mistakes in this list: Salinger spelt with a B as in Balinger, Hemingway spelt with two ‘m’s, To Sir, with Love (1959) incorrectly attributed to Jean Anouilh rather than E.R. Braithwaite. On this reading list, Nedra Orme, Library and Information Studies suggests that ‘after you get over your initial laughter, analyse it for its bias in racism, politics, feminism and family life as well as the obvious sexuality listings’ (Priest 4). Angel Rendle-Short knew how to agitate and get a reaction, how to call out in meetings at the top of her voice – Shame! Shame! – such as she did at a meeting for the Queensland League for National Welfare and Decency in 1971 protesting about the books The Group (1963), Catcher in the Rye (1951), Lolita (1955), Catch-22 (1961), and Lord of the Flies (1954). Such was the uproar of this meeting, one participant reported: ‘Most disturbing of all, though, was the electric feeling of hatred and fear generated in a hall between those who profess a love of Jesus Christ and those who profess an appreciation of culture and a belief in education’ ( Wilson, ‘Are You Concerned About Your Children’s Moral Welfare?’). 66

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In 1978, Semper Floreat, the University of Queensland’s student newspaper, published a list that circulated in various places of close to 150 books under the title, ‘Rona’s Death List: Burn a Book a Day.’ It included such titles as Lolita, The Catcher in the Rye, To Sir, with Love, The Group, Gone with the Wind (1936), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Mrs Dalloway (1925), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), The Grass is Singing (1950), A Doll’s House (1879), Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), My Brother Jack (1964), Clean Straw for Nothing (1969), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). When STOP and CARE refuted the books on this list, alternatives were recommended such as I Found God in Soviet Russia (1959) and Tortured for Christ (1940) (STOP PRESS, 1.2 2). Lists like this of books to read and not to read circulated far and wide: among those on the Right because they wanted to bring their concerns to the attention of politicians and educators and the press and to anyone who would take notice, particularly worried parents; among those on the Left, who protested about the protesters, who wanted to protect civil liberties, uphold good literature, and the right of books to be read by anyone able to read. No, I haven’t read every book myself but when a parent comes to me and says a book is not suitable for high school students to read, it goes on the list. (Knight 14) ‘Lewd and salacious books’ were singled out because they dealt with lesbianism, such as in Mary McCarthy’s The Group, and homosexuality in James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), criticised for its depiction of ‘abnormal sex,’ the ‘sordid’ and ‘unorthodox’ (‘Books Fit to Study’ 2). Similarly targeted were those books projecting ‘insidious propaganda’ such as Lord of the Flies, where boys turn into savages (Dique 2). Such material assists students … by recruiting them for rebellion and by training them to accept immorality, degradation, violence and other anti-Christian principles as normal and right. (‘Protest’) Books that attacked ‘middle-class values, particularly self-discipline’ were objected to because of the salutary consequences of self-indulgence, especially in sex. Adultery and other manifestations of undisciplined sexuality were described in increasingly clinical detail and were generally associated with excessive drinking or other evasions of personal responsibility, as in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms [1929]. (STOP ACTION SHEET 1) Compilation English texts were targeted by the National Welfare and Decency League, such as Sex in Society, because it promotes masturbation, premarital sex, and sexual experiments, with extracts published in The Courier-Mail. Excerpts of these books were also published and circulated so parents could be brought ‘face to face with the present evil indoctrination of our children in schools’ (Rendle-Short, ‘Moral Pollution’). We may eventually come to realise that chastity is no more a virtue than a malnutrition. It is highly probable that adultery today maintains far more marriages than it destroys. (‘Text Book’ 1) Thus – we discover that despite the recommendation of the English teaching specialists ‘LOLITA’ was thrown out of New Zealand – rejected! Vomited up! Must we in Australia watch it being spooned to our children, and sit back complacently, silently? For silence gives consent. (Rendle-Short, ‘Sowing the Wind’) 67

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The National Archive of Australia houses letters of complaint that were written to the Governor General, Sir Paul Hasluck, copied to the Prime Minister of Australia, Bill McMahon, and Premier of Queensland, Bjelke-Petersen. Titles such as The Group, Catch-22, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Kangaroo (1923) were mentioned. J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye was singled out as being pornographic. Large extracts from Salinger’s book are quoted, before the writer makes the point: ‘This is not EDUCATION; it is DEFILEMENT’ (Rendle-Short, Letter to Hasluck). If you want to know the truth I’m a virgin, I really am. I’ve had quite a few opportunities to lose my virginity and all, but I never got around to it yet … After you neck girls for a while you really can watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn’t any brains. (Salinger qtd in Rendle-Short, Letter to Hasluck) Copulation every 50-odd pages, mixed with a dash of lesbianism, a pinch of male homosexuality and just a touch of genitalia measuring. (‘Segregating Literature’ 9) Letters were also written to schools to complain and force change: For not only do books such as this one [Catcher in the Rye] degrade the immature reader through its whole atmosphere of implied immorality, permissiveness and discontent within the family circle; but also the girl [student] will unconsciously wonder that their school, which has a strong Christian foundation and actively teaches a Biblical Morality in Divinity classes, allows such books in the library. (Rendle-Short, Letter to Sister Julian) Charles Porter, the Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) for Toowong, led the charge among the politicians by campaigning against these ‘dirty’ books, objecting to ‘passages being taken off lavatory walls, put down on paper, stuck between covers and called a book’ (‘Segregating Literature’ 9). He was supported by the Labor MP for Port Curtis, Martin ‘Marty’ Hanson, who read out passages from Catcher in the Rye, The Group, and Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse (1961) in parliament. He said, for the record: ‘I certainly do not want my children, or anyone else’s children, to have to stomach that filth in their formative years. It is absolutely disgusting’ (Hanson 404). We actively discourage the presence in our home of lewd literature and sex saturated books. (Rendle-Short, Letter to Hasluck) In contradistinction to these views, there were letters that defended good literature, making a distinction between good writing and pornography. Pornography thrives on the fear-filled censorship. (Wilson, ‘Views on Sex’ 2) The distinction between books dealing with ‘immorality’ and yet questioning moral standards, not to undermine but to deepen moral understanding, and pornographic books which merely titillate the sexual appetite seems to be lost on many concerned but uninformed parent-correspondents to the Courier-Mail. (Hergenhan 2) Senior students in state high schools wrote letters to the editor defending their right to read good literature. We do not paw over the pages to find the sauciest pieces and then revel in them … How are we as teenagers forming our own ideas, supposed to develop a healthy and presumably mature attitude toward morality if we are to treat a literary classic as ‘just another dirty book?’ (‘Senior Student’ 2) 68

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[F]uture society will be either repressive or permissive but certainly not mature. (Wilson, ‘Views on Sex’ 2) [Many] mothers have come to the conclusion that it is preferable to allow their children to obtain employment after passing Junior level, rather than to risk impairment of their morals through Senior English studies. ( Joyner, ‘Immoral Books’ 2) Still, in 1975, the Queensland Minister for Education changed the policy, telling State School principals they had to seek parents’ approval of books on the school curriculum (‘A Brief H istory’ 2). Thus, before the end of each school year it was deemed that a draft list of books must be made public to parents of students, that parents should be allowed to discuss the list with teachers, and parents would be given a right of appeal, if there was any disagreement. Parents could even demand a special P&C meeting to be called to discuss and decide on texts for the following year, to make sure texts they found objectionable were not part of the curriculum. The Humanists are at war against us – battling everywhere to change our children’s values. They believe in the Socialist anti-God cause and they intend to win. (‘Dangerous Trends’ 2) STOP and CARE objected not only to certain literature and books being read in schools and on the curriculum, but also how these books were being taught, using diaries and logbooks, writing reflections on personal emotions, religion and politics, responding to open questions, role playing, engaging in sociodramas, playing games, creative writing exercises and imaginary and associative activities. They encouraged its members to write letters outlining breaches to rules and standards – ‘Remember to quote the number of the rule that has been contravened … write to the Queensland Literature Board of Review with complaints’ (STOP PRESS, 1.2 2). We have a battle on our hands – a battle to save children from these academics who are trying to destroy their minds and their morals, their character and their chastity. Many parents are testifying that children are being brainwashed, not educated. (STOP PRESS, 1.2 2) The Queensland Literature Board of Review received many complaints and enquiries, and made deliberations as recorded in the Parliamentary Papers of the time. When The Little Red School Book was first published in Australia in 1972, the Board promptly banned it; Queensland was the only state in Australia where this book was banned absolutely (Bruce, ‘Little Red’): ‘a dangerously clever handbook on insurrection and ought, on this account alone, to be banned and disposed of ’ (‘Nundah Pastor’ 9). The Board responded to the provisions of section 8 of ‘The Objectionable Literature Acts 1954 to 1967’ by attacking both the writers and publishers of these works. The Queensland Literature Board of Review escalated the political rhetoric by comparing publishers and writers of literature to something that destroys everything that is good. It stated: ‘The censorship debate is no longer usefully concerned with the right to read but should be concerned with the right of so few to misuse great powers for gain, for gratification and for pollution’ (Eighteenth 2). The writers and publishers of many of these [books] appear to fall into the category of those described in a recent court judgment in Sydney, viz. ‘exploiting the young people of this country for their own gain and that of their employers.’ These people pursue their dollars through the sullied halls of pornography, and can best be described in the words of Shakespeare. They are ‘caterpillars of the Commonwealth.’ (Eighteenth 1) As alliterative metonymy, this Shakespearean phrase, ‘caterpillars of the Commonwealth’ (from Richard II, in which Henry Bolingbroke swears to ‘weed and pluck away’ [Act 2, Scene 3]), is compelling, 69

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transcendent even: the root word ‘pill’ embedded in caterpillar is the same as that for pillage, act of plundering, to rob, to ravage, from pillier: loot, ill-treat. As noted by bibliograffiti of Sutton Books, this Elizabethan phrase of insult ‘evokes the ravaging of Eden, the despoliation of what is fruitful, the ruination of the orderly and the good by greedy predators’ (2). There is no return from such a slur. Every part of education can be open to need, desire, choice, and trying out. (Goodman 18) What is remarkable about this story of moral panic and influence is the extreme but narrow view of what was a small minority of protesters when it comes to the development of young people, schooling, how children learn, the responsibility of educators, and institutions (pro-censorship bodies were estimated to represent 5% of the community [Priest 1]). It was an ideological battle, supported by key public figures, who were able to agitate, sway debate, and make changes. There was no middle ground. Children don’t go to school to learn to think … They go to learn to read and write and spell correctly. They can start thinking when they’re older and their minds are not being manipulated. (Knight 15) A minister of the Brisbane Presbyterian Reformed Church, in an address given to the Conservative Club in Brisbane in 1974, said: I do believe that much foggy thinking is resulting today because we do not have our basic principles clear. We do not know what we believe about a child and what we believe education and its task … I believe in original sin; I believe that man has to be taught; I believe that he has to be led and I believe that there are certain truths that have to be inculcated that are not ‘just there’ naturally. (Shelton 1) Semper Floreat, published by the University of Queensland, liked to target STOP and CARE and their protest. They had a lot of fun with the progressive developments over the years publishing spoofs and reposts in the pages of their paper. A puritan, right-wing reactionary joke. (‘Society to Outlaw’ 6) In one edition, they republished STOP and CARE’s most recent newsletter in full, ‘for your enlightenment,’ with the tagline ‘Satan’s bid for your child’: The bad language and the bad English in many libraries and text books is not culture! It is not refined or scholarly! Not only does this crudeness prick our religious and spiritual convictions, it pricks our culture! Left-wingers, sex perverts and Sweden orientated teachers are taking over our schools and ruining our kids. (6) By reframing the objections in a new context, and by giving expression to its syntax of protest – every imperative and exclamation mark – it highlighted the level of anxiety and hysteria associated with this debate, underscoring the terms of debate as a battle of language and persuasion. The illustration for this particular piece is wild: a large drawing of naked hairy monsters with barred teeth throwing around people like dolls: a satirical picture of living hell. The newspaper headlines of the day also liked to sensationalise: ‘Another Crusader Sets Out To Save Queensland’ ‘Red Threat to Education’ 70

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‘Why Rona And God Joined Up To Stop Porno’ ‘Pornography or Book Burning?’ Joyner’s agitation, along with the protest of other conservatives in Queensland, managed to put enough pressure on the Bjelke-Petersen government that he announced there would be a full enquiry into education in Queensland, led by Michael Ahern. (Ahern was a member of Bjelke-Petersen’s government and the only member of cabinet at that time with tertiary qualifications. He went on to become premier of Queensland in 1987 after the Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption.) The Ahern Inquiry, as it was called, was unprecedented in its scale. It was the first inquiry of its kind since 1885 (Priest 1). It received over 3000 written submissions over 17 days of hearing. Of these submissions, over half of them were made up of forms distributed by STOP and CARE to their members and the Teachers Union; submissions by conservative groups outnumbered those from teachers, two to one (Scott 135). [T]he majority of quiet and sensible Queenslanders, who are the strength of our society, have come forward … and made it abundantly clear that they resent the extremist positions adopted by minorities. (Select Committee 21) When the Select Committee on Education in Queensland met in 1978 after the government banned MACOS and SEMP, Joyner appeared in person to be examined, as did other ‘agitators’ such as George Cook, representing the Community Standards Organisation affiliated with the Festival of Light (members amounting to 210 people), and Angel Rendle-Short. Joyner’s transcript is a litany of claim and counterclaim to do with ‘brainwashing,’ humanist teaching, wanting to outlaw secular humanist-type education in schools, which she called ‘alien philosophy,’ wanting Christian philosophy to underpin everything, and some absurdities about wanting to annul or withdraw from UNESCO treaties (Day 10, 29 Aug. 1978). George Cook (Day 9, 28 Aug. 1978) spoke about the importance of standards and world history, and the danger of ‘values clarification’: The ordinary person thinks values clarification is just a matter of clarifying your existing values. But it has a technical name with ‘Simon’ and his associates. At the top level it is devastating. It means first of all unfreezing, reindoctrination and then refreezing. You unfreeze, which means you destroy their existing values by confronting them with insoluble dilemmas in an insoluble situation – you know, so many in a boat and someone has to be thrown over; who should be thrown over and that sort of thing … To that extent values clarification is terribly dangerous. (500) Anyone who demands the right to whatever he likes without limitation is being totally selfish  – and the ultimate extension of this attitude is anarchy and destruction. (STOP ACTION SHEET 3; original emphasis) Angel Rendle-Short’s appearance began with caring for children: in her view, her own children have been discriminated against because parents have made objections, and they have been separated from the rest of the class and been given alternative literature to study (Day 14). In her mind these children are psychologically traumatised: ‘[G]ive a 13-year-old, “Catcher in the Rye” and I think he is a goner, because he has nothing against which to measure it scholastically’ (800). She also expressed her views about the young women of our society, how in her opinion as a practising GP she is ‘absolutely aghast’: One thing is the disease. Our young women are rotten with disease … I have no doubt whatever that one of the factors has been the type of literature that has been promoted in the schools. Promoted by whom? – The teachers. I say that without fear of contradiction. (797–798) 71

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In the end, after reading all the submissions, and listening to all examinations, the Select Committee rejected the view of the minority at one end of political spectrum, who wanted to change the system, finding their view ‘gloomy’ and unjustified. There are those at the other end of the political spectrum who resist all change; indeed, there are those who apparently wish to move the system backwards. The Select Committee has rejected these views also; it is simply not possible, nor is it sensible, to attempt ‘to march backwards into the future.’ (Select Committee, Final Report 22) Ahern tabled the report in parliament on 18 March 1980, containing a total of 280 recommendations. Later that month, in a transcript of an interview with Joan Priest of the Australian Society of Authors, Ahern made it clear that the pro-censorship organisations have too much influence and that thinking people must now speak out against them … I can assure you that throughout the state these extremists groups are really hated by people generally … We should give NO CREDENCE AT ALL TO THESE EXTREMIST GROUPS. We must fight and fight hard. (8; original emphasis) Interestingly, in all this debate, there is some recognition of the beauty and power of good literature. Angel Rendle-Short writes in answer to a letter from a senior student that literature is the ‘very breath of society; a body of creative imaginings, the collective intellect of humanity and the wisdom of our ancestors, handed down from one generation to the next’ (‘Literary “Charlatans”’). When writing to the Governor General, Sir Paul Hasluck, she confesses she is ‘thoroughly aroused and anxious and inquisitive … There is no pornography in this book [Lolita], moreover it is beautifully written. But it is a rotten book and fit only to be burned’ (‘Moral Pollution’). Rona Joyner confesses nearly the same: ‘I’m not a prude. I read Lolita years ago and I found it a gripping book’ (qtd in Knight 14). In 2015, Lolita turned 60. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. (Nabokov 7) To celebrate the milestone, Elle Hardy asks: in an era of ‘trigger warnings’ and PC censorship, would Lolita be as seductive today, would Nabokov have got away with it?: Soft centred university censorship doesn’t have the same edge as fire and brimstone religious moralists, but it is equally troubling: for if our arts graduates can’t – won’t – read for ‘aesthetic bliss,’ as Nabokov called it, if literature is reduced to a plaything of critical theory, then what is the point? On the sexagenarian years of this book, Sarah Weinman wonders how to reread old texts in the light of the recent #MeToo movement: No one will ever pick up that novel and issue a shocked report about its true contents; no feminist academic will make her reputation by revealing its oppressive nature. Its explicit subject is as abhorrent today as it was upon the book’s publication 60-plus years ago. It is hard to know how to finish this tale. Perhaps it is best left to readers. Kurt Vonnegut’s books Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Breakfast of Champions (1973) did not appear on Rona’s Death List. 72

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But he once famously said in a speech given at the dedication of the Shain Library at Connecticut College, New London: ‘By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle’ (‘Noodle Factory’).

Works Cited Ahern, Michael. ‘Reports of the Select Committee on Education.’ Questions without Notice. 18 Mar. 1980. Hansard Report on Select Committee. 2716–2723. Australian Society of Authors. ‘Report requested by the Quarterly General Meeting, Australian Society of Authors, 23/2/80, from the Queensland membership Vice-President on the effectiveness of the Community Standards Organisation and other pro-censorship bodies [manuscript].’ UQF2288, 5 leaves. Fryer Library, University of Queensland. Bailey, R. ‘Our “Wowser State.”’ Letters to the Editor. Courier-Mail 14 Feb. 1975: 2. bibliograffiti. ‘The Caterpillars of the Commonwealth.’ Bibliograffiti 7 Oct. 2014. . ‘Book Ban Denies a Right – Librarian.’ Courier-Mail 29 Apr. 1972: 7. ‘Books Fit to Study.’ Editorial. Courier-Mail 4 Sept. 1971: 2. ‘A Brief History.’ STOP PRESS 15 Mar. 1985. 1–4. Bruce, Joan. ‘Rona Joyner and the Society to Outlaw Pornography.’ SL Blogs. John Oxley Library, 26 Sept. 2016. ———. ‘Little Red School Book.’ SL Blogs. John Oxley Library, 4 May 2017. Campbell, Craig. ‘MACOS and SEMP: Queensland (and Australia), 1970s–1990s.’ Dehanz 6 Mar. 2018. . Cook, George. Day 9. Brisbane. 5 Sept. 1978. Select Committee of Inquiry – Education. Queensland Legislative Assembly, Queensland Parliament. UQFL81, Box 9 (81/12). Fryer Library, University of Queensland. 705–800. ‘Dangerous Trends in Education.’ Care: Burning Issue (1976): 2. Davidson, Jim. ‘Interview with Thomas Shapcott.’ Meanjin 38.1 (1979): 56–68. Dique, J.C.A. ‘Unsuitable Reading.’ Letters to the Editor. Courier-Mail 23 Sept. 1971: 2. Eighteenth Annual Report. The Literature Board of Review. Covering the Period 1/7/1971 to 30/6/1972. Parliamentary Papers. Brisbane: Government Printer (A. 22–1972). ‘“Free Love” Books in School Slated.’ Courier-Mail 3 Feb. 1972: 12. Goodman, Paul. Education Action Newsletter. Australian Queensland Branch. Nov–Dec 1971: 18. Greig, Beverley. ‘Literature and Morals.’ Letters to the Editor. Courier-Mail 29 Jan. 1972: 2. Hall, James, and Sandra Hall. Australian Censorship: The XYZ of Love. Sydney, NSW: Jack de Lissa, 1970. Hanson, Martin. Address in Reply. Hansard 7 Sept. 1971. 404–406. Hardy, Elle. ‘Lolita Turns 60.’ Spectator 10 Oct. 2015. . Hergenhan, L.T. ‘Parents “Uninformed” on Sexy Books.’ Letters to the Editor. Courier-Mail 20 Jan. 1972: 2. Hood, Ken. ‘Books and the “Moral Landslide.”’ Letters to the Editor. Courier-Mail 26 Jan. 1972: 2. ‘In Brief: Education “Nearing Crisis.”’ Canberra Times 27 Sept. 1971: 3. Joyner, Rona. ‘Immoral Books in High School, Too.’ Letters to the Editor. Courier-Mail 14 Jan. 1972: 2. ———. Day 10. Brisbane. 29 Aug. 1978. Select Committee of Inquiry – Education. Queensland Legislative Assembly, Queensland Parliament. UQFL81, Box 9 (81/12). Fryer Library, University of Queensland. 584–596. Knight, Anne. ‘Always on a Thursday with Anne Knight.’ Gold Coast Bulletin 9 Mar. 1978: 14–15. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin, 1955. ‘Nundah Pastor Critical.’ Courier-Mail 7 Jun. 1972: 9. ‘Parents to Have Say on Books.’ Courier-Mail 25 Sept. 1975: 12. ‘Pornography or Book Burning?’ Editorial. Courier-Mail 9 Oct. 1971: 2. Priest, Joan. ‘Report Requested by the Quarterly General Meeting, Australian Society of Authors, 23/2/80, from the Queensland Membership Vice-President on the Effectiveness of the Community Standards Organisation and other Pro-censorship Bodies [manuscript].’ Australian Society of Authors. UQF2288, 5 leaves. Fryer Library, University of Queensland. ‘Protest Against High School Textbooks.’ Ephemera. STOP & CARE. UQFVF390 S12.9. Fryer Library, University of Queensland.

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Francesca Rendle-Short ‘Radio Plan Loud But Not Clear.’ Courier-Mail 27 Oct. 1975: 8. Ray, John. ‘Foreword.’ Nabokov, Lolita. 1–4. ‘Red Threat to Education.’ Toowoomba Chronicle 9 Sept. 1971: 4. Rendle-Short, Angel. Letter to the Rt. Hon. Sir Paul Hasluck, Governor General of Australia. 7 Aug. 1971 and 1 Jun. 1972. A2880/1, 2/1/3913. From ‘Individuals – Requests and Complaints Received from People within Australia – Dr A. Rendle-Short.’ National Archives of Australia. ———. ‘Moral Pollution: Diagnosis and Remedy,’ ‘(Confidential – For Parents Only),’ ‘Individuals – Requests and Complaints Received from People within Australia – Dr A. Rendle-Short.’ 7 Aug. 1971–14 Jun. 1972. National Archives of Australia A2880. ———. ‘Sowing the Wind: Reaping the Whirlwind,’ ‘Individuals – Requests and Complaints Received from People within Australia – Dr A. Rendle-Short.’ 7 Aug. 1971–14 Jun. 1972. National Archives of Australia A2880. ———. ‘Literary “Charlatans.”’ Letters to the Editor. Courier-Mail 28 Dec. 1971: 2. ———. Letter to Sister Julian. Personal Correspondence. 14 Apr. 1973. ———. Day 14. Brisbane. 28 Aug. 1978. Select Committee of Inquiry – Education. Queensland Legislative Assembly, Queensland Parliament. UQFL81, Box 9 (81/12). Fryer Library, University of Queensland. 496–504. ‘Rona’s Death List: Burn a Book a Day.’ Semper Floreat 15 Mar. 1978: 7. Scott, Ann. ‘The Banning of SEMP in Queensland.’ Interest Groups and Public Policy. Ed. Roger Scott. Melbourne, VIC: Macmillan 1980. 116–151. ‘Segregating Literature and Sex Education.’ Australian 6 Sept. 1971: 9. Select Committee on Education in Queensland. Final Report. Parliamentary Papers. Brisbane: Government Print. 1979/1980. Vol. 1. Part 1. 21–100. ‘Senior Student.’ ‘No Sniggers at “Shocking” Parts of Novels, says Student.’ Letters to the Editor. Courier-Mail 23 Dec. 1971: 2. Shapcott, Thomas. Interview with Jim Davidson. Meanjin 38.1 (1979): 56–68. Shelton, D.C. Education – For What? Nundah, QLD: Covenanter Press, 1974. ‘Society to Outlaw Pornography.’ Semper Floreat 45.5 (1975): 6–7. STOP ACTION SHEET. 1971–. Lutwyche, QLD: STOP and CARE. Feb. 1974. State Library of Queensland. ‘Stop and Care Acts Again.’ 1971–. Lutwyche, QLD: STOP and CARE. 12.11 Aug. 1983. State Library of Queensland. STOP PRESS. 1971–. Lutwyche, QLD: STOP and CARE. 1.1 Mar. 1972, 1.2 Jun. 1972, 3.1 Jan. 1974. State Library of Queensland. ‘Text Book Obscene, Says Decency League.’ Courier-Mail 24 Jul. 1971: 1. Vonnegut, Kurt. ‘The Noodle Factory.’ Connecticut College, New London, 1976. . Weinman, Sarah. ‘The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalised the World.’ Atlantic Sept. 2018. . Wilson, R.B.J. ‘“Are You Concerned About Your Children’s Moral Welfare?”’ Queensland League for the National Welfare and Decency Public Meeting. FDO Fielding Collection. UQFL126, Box 11. Fryer Library, University of Queensland. ———. ‘Views on Sex in School Books.’ ‘Surprised.’ Letters to the Editor. Courier-Mail 4 Sept. 1971: 2.

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8 ‘MAD, MUDDY, MESS OF EELS’ Modern Theatre and Patrick White’s Sensuous Dramaturgy Janet McDonald The line, ‘mad, muddy, mess of eels,’ spoken by the Young Man in his opening soliloquy (White 15) of The Ham Funeral, possibly conjures Patrick White’s own inner monologue regarding the state of dramatic censorship and stasis in Australian theatre in 1961. Although the play itself was written in 1947, and all but abandoned by White, its debut on the Australian stage (Adelaide, 1961) was fraught (messy and muddy) with artistic and moral differences that are well documented by scholars and biographers. And yet, the collaboration between White and John Tasker, White’s anointed director for the original performance of the play, provides some insight into how the internationally renowned novelist translated and transformed language for the stage. According to Robert F. Brissenden (290), it is a feat only several novelists have successfully achieved (where is it not an adaptation of a novel for the stage or film). He did not translate his novels, but acknowledged a hankering for the stage, no doubt encouraged by his mother who took him to see as much live theatre as possible in his youth. This chapter considers the little-discussed use of dramaturgy as an active literary criticism method that renders a narrative live, through embodiment, the playwright’s intentions. Julian Meyrick asserts that White’s early plays demonstrate a ‘sense of the future’ of Australian theatre (1) and this chapter thus uses White’s The Ham Funeral as a case study for how he specifically defied traditional Australian dramatic convention of the mid-twentieth century in order to enhance new ways of writing plays for Australian audiences. His focus on the somatic rendering of the language in The Ham Funeral specifically requires live bodies to realise crucial dramatic meaning occurring at the interface between language and liveness.

The Ham Funeral Written while White was still in London in 1947, the play itself is described by most theatre scholars as deliberately anti-realist, which mobilises various twentieth-century dramatic styles and conventions: symbolism, expressionism, vaudeville, tragi-comedy, the absurd. White openly referred to it as a ‘tragic farce’ (Varney and D’Urso 49), which clearly predates the published works of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, and Harold Pinter. He had a solid knowledge of post-First World War anti-realist progenitors who engaged in anti-art (Dadaism) and anti-establishment methods (Surrealism, Symbolism, and Expressionism). David Marr, White’s biographer, records that White expressed in a letter to fellow expatriate Australian actor Keith Michell in 1957 that he was unsure if ‘drama itself was possible in Australia.’ White’s reasoning was his experience of Australian parochialism, ‘because we are undramatic, too boring. The average Australian can’t tell one anything without making it sound pointless. Such a chronic shapelessness can build novels, but drama 75

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will hardly flourish in it’ (qtd in Marr, Patrick White 385). Echoes of his writings to Michell are embedded in The Ham Funeral, his first play, which is deliberately not set in Australia, although it could be: ‘It could be that I was born I Birmingham … or Brooklyn … or Murwillumbah …’ (White, The Ham Funeral 15). The elusive house’s only clear location is that it is metropolitan, not urban, and although Tasker did request some changes to the ‘place’ of the action in the first production, White sets the play in a ‘weird cultural netherworld’ (Croggan 2). The Young Man’s opening soliloquy attests to the ambiguity of the play’s location and White warns the audience that it may not be their kind of play, but that there will be no refunds: ‘You must simply sit it out, and see whether you can’t recognise some of the forms that will squirm before you in this mad, muddy mess of eels’ (The Ham Funeral 15). The Young Man, whom we may safely assume is the voice of White (Brissenden 291), suggests the ‘inherent deception of theatricality’ which matches White’s reaction against realism in this play as was his desire to experiment in opening up what could be possible on the Australian stage; to ‘rupture the fourth wall’ (Varney and D’Urso 54; Brisbane, ‘Foreword’ 7). While Dennis Carroll suggests that the implications of the play for the Australian context, at this time, are ‘only indirect’ (131), more recent scholarship suggests that White’s ‘overall achievement was to “fracture the artificiality of [Australian theatre’s] old genres and forms”’ (McCallum qtd in Varney and D’Urso 5). Even before he considered it for production, White wrote The Ham Funeral as a vehicle to expose the deluded dominant British theatrical traditions, drenched in realism, that were entrenched in the Australian theatre; also known as the ‘cultural cringe’ which privileges imported culture over local (23). White knew that very few non-realist plays ‘of the 1950s were staged by leading little theatres let alone the emergent non-commercial professional theatre’ (Carroll 128). Leading up to its first performance in Adelaide, The Ham Funeral was a victim of ‘anti-theatrical prejudice’ and the practice of exclusion by the Board of Governors of the 1962 Adelaide Arts Festival ardently rejected (rather than censored) the work for performance at the Festival, with individual advisors citing it as ‘filthy’ (McBide qtd in Varney and D’Urso 54, 41). These influential Board Members were not practising theatre artists, but proponents of a ‘muddy, messy madness’ as they stated that White’s play drew out the ‘public suspicion of art’ by the audience and that White’s perceived ‘sophistication in the theatre’ would ‘discourage the public from buying tickets to his plays’ (43, 86). Anthony Burgess once described White as ‘the major justification for the existence of Australia’ (qtd in Craven 7). It is not surprising that White’s internationally celebrated literary uniqueness (particularly his novels) had no standing in the Board’s crafted moralistic evaluations of The Ham Funeral; in fact, they ironically articulated their rejection in terms of White’s perceived elitist ‘sophistication’ as grounds for box-office ruin, as well as their abhorrence of the subject matter in the play (lust, abortion, death, parochialism). White’s preference for anti-theatricalism meant that the progressive way of creating new works for the theatre in Australia was denounced in Adelaide as dangerously vulgar and suspiciously artistic.1 The censure, however, stimulated other avenues for action and the play did go into production, three months earlier than the Festival, performed instead by the University of Adelaide Guild on 15 November 1961 at the Union Theatre, in protest of White’s much-publicised rejection. The box-office and critical acclaim of this production created pressure on the play to be produced in White’s home-town Sydney at the Palace Theatre in 1962, giving White full power to ‘veto the director, cast and theatre’ (Marr, Patrick White 395). The literary and critical responses remained positive, which increased enthusiasm for the production of White’s three other plays of this time period: Season at Sarsaparilla (also first performed by the Adelaide University Theatre Guild on 14 September 1962, directed by John Tasker), A Cheery Soul (Melbourne, 19 November 1963, directed by John Sumner), and Night on Bald Mountain (Adelaide, 9 March 1964, also directed by John Tasker). The critical responses of the time, namely, by theatre critics and scholars writing in Meanjin and other publications attest to the box-office success of The Ham Funeral, perhaps because they could see that this vehicle could rock the establishment 76

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and bring Australian theatre forward to a more progressive place (namely, ­Brissenden in 1964, Kippax in 1962, Taylor in 1973, and Tasker in 1964). David Marr supports this, observing that the controversy around the play no doubt brought more people to see it. In short, The Ham Funeral had become a rallying point for those who were unhappy with the boring, official culture of Australia … and hated the philistine power of the Establishment … to determine what was written and read in a country where books, films, and plays continued to be censored and banned. (Patrick White 394) The Ham Funeral is an interesting vehicle to explore White’s specific dramaturgy that allowed this play to capture the zeitgeist of a time when Australian writing for the stage began to mature. ­Brissenden unequivocally links White’s skill as a novelist to his substantial offerings as a playwright: ‘Patrick White … looks like proving an exception to the general rule that good novelists don’t necessarily make good dramatists’ (290). While the Board of Governors felt compelled to condemn White’s playwriting sophistication because he was a novelist and an anti-realist, an examination of the use of language in The Ham Funeral is central to his dramaturgical success as a playwright.

Why Dramaturgy? In one of the only published handbooks on the roles of dramaturgy, What is Dramaturgy? (2009), Bert Cardullo provides examples of how dramaturgs or literary managers may be deployed in professional theatre practice. It is a key text for understanding how dramatic analysis impacts the functions a dramaturg performs, from the preparation of play texts for performance, advising directors and actors, as well as educating the audience (3–4). Dramaturgy is an interface between the visual and actual language of the play with the fictional world of the play being the locus for discussions around what is plausible for the translation of words into embodied actions on a stage. Dramaturgical analysis differs from literary criticism as it relies on the understanding of how the embodiment of a written text-into-a-performance-text occurs on a constructed stage space. The experiential quality of the work is not just in the realm of the imagination: rather it is manifested in action and real time. Liz Gunner refers to this as ‘somatic rendering’ (117), a narrative translated onto the living body of actor-in-character through a process of rehearsal, discussion, reflection and production. The physical and material elements of producing live performance is inextricably linked to dramatic analysis, and an active dramaturgy by the playwright (if living) sometimes occurs at the writing stage (working ‘on the floor’ with actor-bodies to realise language) or at the production stage (where language of the text is interpreted for action). In the latter, dramaturgy addresses the transformation of language on and of the bodies producing the visible text; language is therefore realised as a living breathing experience of the text. Meyrick quite rightly asserts that realism dominated the Australian theatre before White delivered The Ham Funeral to Adelaide (6). To my knowledge there was no such thing as a ‘literary manager’ nor ‘dramaturg’ at the Union Theatre or Adelaide Festival. Generally speaking, Australian theatre has not embraced the use of dramaturgs as much as Europe and the United States, although there are some excellent working dramaturgs in several theatres, particularly where new works are being created and in production. It is not unusual for the playwright themselves to fulfil a dramaturgical role when developing their writing. In most cases directors and designers also use dramaturgical intentions to realise the potential for a work that is yet to go into rehearsal. John Tasker, the director of the first production of The Ham Funeral (1961), had the enviable luxury of being able to discuss the play directly with the living playwright, as have Jim Sharman and Neil Armfield and other emerging directors and actors in the Australian theatre sector (Marr, Patrick White 3; McCallum qtd in Varney and D’Urso 5; Croggan 2). 77

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By the time The Ham Funeral had its premiere in 1961, White had already published six novels and was an internationally recognised author (Varney and D’Urso 41). Yet, White crafted The Ham Funeral not as a translation of a novel into a play script; rather, as a novelist he crafted his exquisite use of language as the key dramaturgical device to elicit action from live bodies in a fictional place: a constructed stage. The language of the play coaches the story into being, and as an avid theatregoer, White became what Cardullo calls a ‘spokesperson for the word, if not a creator of words … architect, archaeologist, the discoverer, transmitter and interpreter of playtexts’ (10). The peculiar yet elusive element of theatrical production is its liveness; there is no play that is ever performed the same way twice. The trite phrase ‘you had to be there,’ is part of the experience of attending a live event, and the thing that originally drew a censorious view of the White’s play by the Board of Governors at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts was the very act of live bodies enacting the text. The liveness creates challenges ‘where authorities become obsessed with the “immorality of public displays, of arousing the audience, and, most importantly, of those who professional practice the art of deception”’ (Puchner qtd in Varney and D’Urso 38). The blending and blurring of fiction and actual bodies on stage is a heady combination for someone like White who, although somewhat introverted, defined himself, in Flaws in the Glass (1981) as a ‘frustrated actor who writes fiction which is a performance of his identity’ (Kruse qtd in Holloway 304). He was aware of his own composition as a ‘cast of contradictory characters,’ stating that his homosexuality provided him with ‘the freedom … to play so many roles’ as a kind of ‘theatrical dressing-up – tricking himself out in words’ (305). While practising the ‘art of deception’ in actual life, the reality of being outwardly gay in mid twentieth-century Australia sharpened White’s somatic understanding of contradiction as the basis for his dramaturgical understanding. Peta Tait suggests that theatre can embody intellectual ideas: ‘expressions of thinking need not be spoken and written. Instead, they can be interpreted in reception directly through bodies in performance’ (1). Bodies are deployed into coding on stage that references (cites) ideas and other bodies, is seen by a live audience (sights), and situated (sites) in ‘interesting cultural geographies’ (1–2). As playwright and dramaturg, White’s coding practice for creating fictional bodies (characters) was based in his own performative habits and on people he knew (Varney and D’Urso 86). Rather than detest parochial Australians (as suggested in his letters to Michell in the 1950s), White revealed a love for them, delving into the ‘dead heart of Australia’ to find it was ‘not only teaming with life, but endowed with a leathery will to survive’ (Brisbane, ‘Foreword’ 7). Particularly, White provides a language that allows a ‘conventionally inarticulate character with the means to express their inner life’ (8). What is remarkable about researching White’s dramaturgical applications in the writing and production of his first play, The Ham Funeral, is the lack of critical dramaturgy around this seminal process. Evidence of White’s collaboration with Tasker is essential to exploring this assertion, and I am also indebted to the work of theatre critics of the time (for instance, Brissenden and Kippax), as well as the firsthand accounts of dramaturgs such as May-Brit Akerholt who experienced how the performativity of White’s language impacted on the bodies of actors. This somatic rendering, therefore, is a critical understanding of the nature of dramatic literary analysis: that the body is a vital locus of knowledge, an active meaning-making device that is assembled and spatially constructed on a fictional stage for consumption by a live audience.

White’s Dramaturgy as Somatic Rendering In the introduction to Peter Holloway’s revised edition of Contemporary Australian Drama (1987), he suggests that dramaturgical intent is paramount to dramatic meaning, stating that the ‘business of drama is, in essence, to make known the world of the audience to itself ’ (45). White and the Australian painter, William Dobell, were friends while both residing in London between the two 78

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World Wars. Dobell recounted to White that when his landlord suddenly collapsed and died, the landlady asked him to help her lift the still-warm corpse on a bed in an upstairs room (Blake; Varney and D’Urso 35). Dobell’s oil painting, The Dead Landlord (1936), added a further layer of sensuousness to the narrative, showing the bloated dead body on the bed, while the naked, voluptuous Landlady brushes her hair in grief (or relief?). This painting, with its oily rendering of the story on a canvas, focusses on the living and the dead body; this was the dramaturgical stimulus for White’s writing of The Ham Funeral. Mr and Mrs Lusty manifest the unnamed landlord and his wife in the play. The 1985 edition of White’s Collected Plays features a rare photograph of Joan Bruce as Mrs Lusty and Hedley Cullen as the Landlord in the first production of the play by the Adelaide University Theatre Guild in 1961 (12). Remarkably, the actors look like an Australianised version of the loathsome Ma and Pa Ubu in Alfred Jarry’s definitively and defiantly anti-realist, Ubu Roi, first performed on 10 December 1896 in Paris, where a riot ensued. As already discussed, the Arts Festival Board of Governors also reacted with disgust at the audacious sensuality of the characters in The Ham Funeral, which conjured a similar dream-space of potential for the stage, prompting Alison Croggan to state that White’s early plays ‘appeared on stage like aliens’ (3). Both Dobell’s painting and the staged photograph are citational ‘texts,’ intrinsically rendering a two-dimensional account of the body that provide evidence of the sensuousness and somatic necessity of The Ham Funeral. Tasker specifically refers to White’s sensual use of language in his plays, noting that it provides ample ‘references to sights, sounds and smells. This quality of direct animal awareness “anchors” his plays in a dramatic reality’ and provides a ‘complexity and persistence of physical awareness’ (301). It is the allure of ‘the other’ from a ‘seedy background, [where] there’s something enticing for the majority of us who are middle-class … it’s a world we might have brushed against’ (Norris 2). White’s application of the somatic sensuality of language suggests his command of the theatrical instrument itself (2). The Ham Funeral avoids a narrowness in how it might be categorised as it engages stylistic conventions that rely on body and movement to make a scene work: vaudeville, Greek chorus, and bawdy humour (Akerholt 9). Writing at the time of White’s early years in the theatre, Andrew Taylor states that it is White’s ‘no attempt at naturalism’ which provides insight into the coherence of the play; the ‘play’s language can be both more explicit and more evocative. This produces a solidifying of the figures, a sharpening of their dramatic interaction and a greater vitality of language’ (273). Contradiction manifests the tension in this style that is removed from a formulaic well-made play structure, rhythmically manifested by the mix of ‘colloquial speech and heightened prose’ in his dramatic dialogue (Akerholt, ‘A Glorious, Terrible Life’ 155). Predating the indelible characters created by Beckett (Nagg and Nell in Endgame [1953]), White’s old music-hall performer characters have become scavengers who are cracking jokes, rummaging through rubbish only to discover a foetus in a bin (White, ‘The Ham Funeral’ 1.7). The contradictions of the comedy-schtick mixed with the horrific discovery seek to expose the Young Man to life outside the house where he must begin to grow as a person. Similarly, the vaudevillian exchanges between the Relatives (2.1) suggest familial memory punctuated by a nasty suspicion of Alma Lusty, their relative’s widow. This whole scene takes place in the basement of the house where they ingest the ham and drink to forget, demonstrating their ‘all-consuming love of the flesh’ (Carroll 131). They appear as a chorus of Alma’s tormentors (131), a comi-tragic juxtaposition that portrays ‘the darker side of life combined with a comic expression of it’; even as they refer to her as ‘Alma’ (her name in the dramatis personae is ‘Landlady’), their bullying tactics nonetheless produce a fertile place that ‘hints at her capacity to develop’ as a character (131) so that she emerges as ‘more than a representation of lust’ (Akerholt, Patrick White 15, 21). The oscillation between fascination and repulsion by the Young Man towards Alma is the fabric of a play which uses contradictions that heighten the mundane and urban even as they are mocked through the humour of White’s prose. Importantly, Taylor again lays the success of the play as not only the 79

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use of language, but how the language is enlivened by the characters, ‘from the way the figures of the drama refuse to be mere symbols but generate their significance through a genuine dramatic life’ (276). Tasker articulates the work in early rehearsals, many attended by White, where the close examination of the language only happens as a result of the flesh (embodiment); characters cannot avoid being ‘caught up in the processes of living’ (Brissenden 292) that generate the dramatic lives on stage. According to Tasker, unlocking the pathos occurred through experimentation of the physical and emotional quality of the language (300–301). Reviews of the most recent production of The Ham Funeral (Griffin Theatre, Sydney, 2017) state the director, Kate Gaul, made similar revelations about White’s use of language: the ‘tone jumps from colloquial to heightened in a moment. But those are exactly the kinds of challenges actors love to meet because you don’t often encounter them in contemporary plays’ (qtd in Blake). The somatic ‘flaws’ of the characters articulated in The Ham Funeral must work through the process of embodiment (an often sweaty, funny, visceral exercise by the actors) that are particular to theatre rehearsals where the actual/live body and the fictional ones achieve the sense of a ‘whole’ that White’s use of language induces. It was Tasker’s students at NIDA who provided the first vocalised live/embodied ‘performance’ that White had experienced of The Ham Funeral (Marr, Patrick White 392). The nature of White’s collaborative dramaturgy occurred not during the writing of the play, but 15 years later ‘on the floor’ with the director and actors. By all accounts, this lively engagement invigorated him and his writing. John ‘Tilly’ Tasker was nominated by White to be the very first director, to whom White’s life-partner Manoly Lascaris referred as ‘the virus’ that ‘brought excitement back to Patrick White’s life’ (392). Similarly, Jim Sharman’s revival of White’s early plays in the mid-1970s stimulated him to be commissioned (by Sharman) to write a new play, The Signal Driver (1982) which White, incidentally, dedicated to another emerging young Australian director, Neil Armfield (Marr, ‘The Final Chapter’). In a review of Sharman’s autobiography Blood and Tinsel (2008), Katherine Brisbane states that White’s plays were ‘an ideal medium for Sharman’ whose imaginative forces ‘converted them from “literary” works to soaring vehicles for actors such as Robyn Nevin.’ The flesh is never very far away from the dramaturgical concerns within The Ham Funeral. The mad, messy, muddy eels of actors’ bodies writhing through rehearsals provided the locus of meaning for directors and actors who worked with White. Armfield, who has directed 10 productions of White’s plays, states that White knew this, which is why he was so selective about his directors. And it’s not a case of bad writing needing to be rescued … rather the [early] plays present great challenges … He created parts that actors love to play. His characters are clowns requiring the finest to release them. (6–7) Armfield, like Tasker and Sharman, were affectionately part of White’s youthful entourage of artists that he hand-selected to appoint the correct actors to capture the nuance of the text, and Armfield’s tribute to White details the grumpy yet beguiling White who used the fiction of his plays to hint at and embody his own rich inner life. His avatar, the Young Man in The Ham Funeral states, ‘Once I almost wrote a play, in which the situations were too subtle to express’; presumably White knew words were not enough to enliven the text (2.2.55). Like Tasker, Armfield encouraged White’s attendance during early rehearsals so that his own liveness could be used to unlock the codes of language embedded in the script. Armfield states that White referred to this ritual as ‘little Neily’s search for meaning’ (5) which, although patronising, suggests White’s familiar teasing of Armfield’s respect of the text. Akerholt was the dramaturg on Armfield’s remounting of The Ham Funeral (November, 1989) and provides further firsthand insight into White’s dramaturgy: he understood the actors’ craft, ‘his dramatic writing gives them a dialogue they can work with; that they can manipulate and transform into action’ (‘A Glorious, Terrible Life’ 154). Harold Kippax 80

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(like Brissenden) had already confirmed White’s use of somatic language in The Ham Funeral back in 1961, stating that ‘Mr White, at one blow, has demonstrated something that still needs to be learned in England and America – that drama’s richest resources is the language’ (qtd in Marr, Patrick White 395), and Akerholt captures White’s peculiar yet profound insight into his language that is full of the contradictions contained in the mixture of colloquial and heightened dialogue. Early rehearsals with the cast and crew feature the reading of the entire play by actors and director to help discover the speech patterns and imagery from the text; in one rehearsal actors where struggling with a particular line and Armfield turned to White to enquire what it meant: ‘White lifted the book and he read the line, the words ringing out in his inimitable voice; then he lowered the book and said “That’s what the line means”’(Akerholt, ‘A Glorious, Terrible Life’ 156). He chose not to lecture the group with the fundamentals of grammar or syntax, but rather to embody the text in order to induce the relevance. Akerholt states that this small act was a ‘revelation’ where the ‘meaning is not in a paraphrase of the words, but in the very quality of the words themselves, in their sound, their placement’ (156). Here, he was demonstrating ‘tricking himself out with words’ (Kruse 305), the kernel of his ability to create such extraordinary characters in his novels. This very brief insight by Akerholt attests to White’s own somatic rendering of language as key to unlocking dramatic meaning. Although not exclusively a playwright or screenwriter, Christos Tsiolkas is an Australian novelist who also actively engages in translating his novels into body-renderings on film and television (Loaded [as Head On, 1995], The Slap [2008], Barracuda [2013]). In Tsiolkas’s most recent foray into his own realisation of White’s narrative works, he does not directly discuss White’s dramatic works. His interrogation of White’s novels, however, reveals a liveness, a somatic quality to the words, explaining that White had a fierce will to tell a story and create an imaginary world that resonates with the reality the reader inhabits, will inevitably become part of the way you wish to tell your own stories and will influence the way you conjure your own imaginary worlds. (5) Conjuring imaginary worlds is the very essence of The Ham Funeral, and the dramaturgical process, with its reliance on embodiment or somatic rendering, acts as a kind maieutic ritual ‘to make known the world of the audience to itself ’ (Holloway 45). The Ham Funeral is a conduit between the experimental, anti-realist ideas from the period after the Second World War, written in 1947 by expatriate White who eventually uses it to disrupt and paralyse the traditional realism of mid-twentieth-century Australian theatre. Dobell’s The Dead Landlord became reanimated in ­performance, made manifest by the atrocious but delectable language delivered by live bodies on an Australian stage. White’s ‘literariness’ was also disrupted by writing plays, suggesting that, often, literary criticism ignores the potential for dramatic criticism to enrich the experience of his mad, muddy, mess of language; as Croggan writes, what may have been rendered as faults then, make White’s work exciting now (3). I agree with Croggan’s final assertion about White’s work: White’s plays remain ‘just an odd little lighthouse’ that makes one wonder what might have happened if his work had obtained greater mainstream success (3).

Note

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Janet McDonald box-office appeal’ (4). Varney and D’Urso’s use of National Library of Australia archives that provided access to personal letters and other rich primary source material allows them to provide a clearer context on how The Ham Funeral might have stirred and encouraged a greater progressive seam of playwriting in Australia, post-1961.

Works Cited Akerholt, May-Brit. Patrick White. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. ———. ‘“A Glorious, Terrible Life”: The Dual Image in Patrick White’s Dramatic Language.’ Vanden Driesen and Ashcroft, Patrick White Centenary. 152–163. Armfield, Neil. ‘Patrick White: A Centenary Tribute.’ Meanjin 71.2 (2012): 1–9. Blake, Elissa. ‘Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral has Never Been Easy to Digest.’ Sydney Morning Herald 10 May 2017. . Brissenden, Robert F. ‘The Plays of Patrick White.’ Holloway, Contemporary Australian Drama. 290–303. Brisbane, Katharine. ‘Foreword.’ White, Patrick White Collected Plays. 5–8. ———. ‘Review on Blood and Tinsel.’ Sydney Morning Herald 25 Aug. 2008. . Cardullo, Bert. What is Dramaturgy? New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Carroll, Dennis. Australian Contemporary Drama. Redfern, NSW: Currency, 1994. Craven, Peter. ‘Patrick White.’ The Life of Patrick White. Exhibition Catalogue, National Library of Australia. 13 Jul.–28 Oct. 2012. Croggan, Alison. ‘Patrick White, Playwright.’ Theatre Notes: Independent Arts Commentary 27 Aug. 2012. . Gunner, Liz. ‘Ecologies of Orality.’ The Cambridge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Brad Etherington and Jarad Zimbler. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. 116–132. Holloway, Peter, ed. Contemporary Australian Drama. Redfern, NSW: Currency, 1987. Kruse, Axel. ‘Patrick White’s Later Plays.’ Holloway, Contemporary Australian Drama. 304–325. Marr, David. Patrick White: A Life. London: Vintage, 1991. ———. ‘Patrick White: The Final Chapter.’ Monthly Apr. 2008. . Meyrick, Julian. ‘The Great Australian plays: A Cheery Soul Gave Us a Supreme Theatrical Monster.’ Conversation 31 Jan. 2017. . Norris, Adam. ‘Why The Ham Funeral Remains Relevant in Australian Theatre, 70 Years Later.’ Brag 11 May 2017. . Tait, Peta. Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Tasker, John. ‘Notes on The Ham Funeral.’ Meanjin 23.3 (1964): 299–302. Taylor, Andrew. ‘Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral.’ Meanjin 32.3 (1973): 270–278. Tsiolkas, Christos. Christos Tsiolkas on Patrick White. Melbourne, VIC: Black Inc., 2018. Vanden Driesen, Cynthia, and Bill Ashcroft. Patrick White Centenary: The Legacy of a Prodigal Son. Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Varney, Denise, and Sandra D’Urso. Australian Theatre, Modernism, and Patrick White: Governing Culture. New York: Anthem, 2018. White, Patrick. ‘The Ham Funeral.’ 1965. White, Patrick White: Collected Plays. 11–74. ———. Patrick White: Collected Plays. Vol. 1. Redfern, NSW: Currency, 1993.

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SECTION C

Contemporary Australia

9 ‘ARE YOU WITH ME?’ OFFENSIVENESS AND AUSTRALIAN DRAMA IN THE 1970S Julian Meyrick and Jenny Fewster Racist, sexist, lecherous, and alcoholic, Sir Les Patterson, Australia’s ‘cultural attaché to the Court of St. James’ in the United Kingdom, displays uncouth attitudes and behaviours that are recognisably representative in their vulgarity and bad taste (Humphries, My Life As Me; Pender, One Man Show; St Pierre). Sometimes inclined to verse, in 1975 – the year the national arts agency, the Australia Council for the Arts, was made a statutory authority, and two years after the then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam doubled its annual operating budget – Patterson regaled his no-doubt appreciative Sydney audience at the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown with the poetic offering, ‘The Yartz’: What is it I like more than tarts? The Yartz. What passes through my mind in fits and starts? You guessed, The Yartz. Wherever you may roam in foreign parts, Australia always seems to top the charts Re in terms of The Yartz. What have we got these great artistic skills for That other lands would gladly give their pills for? Here’s hoping the Government will find the means for Supporting what all Aussies cream their jeans for: Fillums and opera, macramé work and pomes, Hectares and tonnes of culture in all homes. This isn’t just a dream – it’s come to pass, If you don’t believe me kiss my arse. (Humphries, Neglected Poems 47)

In the ‘fillum’ Les Patterson Saves the World (1987), Sir Les is appointed as the Australian delegate to the United Nations. Making a drunken speech at its New York headquarters after having eaten a large quantity of baked beans, he breaks wind just as the delegate from Abu Niveah – Sheik Mustaphatool – is lighting his pipe. The flatus explosively ignites, setting the ambassador on fire. Sent to the tiny Middle Eastern state as punishment (‘what a dump, could be England’), from whom Australia is hoping to extract a A$10 billion loan, Sir Les bumbles his way through a crisis involving a horribly disfiguring virus that threatens to infect the West thanks to Russian connivance. An exploding koala, detonated by his ‘megastar’ Australian compatriot and rival, Dame Edna Everidge, puts paid to the Arab army commander in charge of contaminating Western bathrooms, while Sir Les locates the virus’s antidote, foils ‘the tea-towel heads’ instigating the 85

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plot, and saves the American President, Joannie, from a contagious toilet seat. Matters end well, with Sir Les having seduced a number of large-breasted young women, sculled a considerable amount of alcohol in a ‘dry’ nation, and taken Joannie in his arms in the Whitehouse Oval Office, decorated pink, in his honour. What does it all mean, wonders Desiree Herpes, the sister of the French doctor who cultivated the virus so he could become famous curing it? ‘It means,’ Patterson opines, ‘that our children and our children’s children can go to the bathroom again, without fear.’ Patterson is the comic creation of writer and performer Barry Humphries and has been presented on stage, screen, print, and audio recording numerous times since his first appearance as a Leagues Club official in 1974 (when he was mistaken for an actual Leagues Club official). Les Patterson Saves the World exemplifies the character’s satirical intent and content (see Humphries, My Gorgeous Life; Pender). Patterson is the archetypal Aussie male slob, offensive in appearance, language, and behaviour. Guardian journalist Luke Buckmaster calls him a vile, swearing, chundering hornbag, roughly comparable in character to an older but no less civilised Barry McKenzie. He looks like a splotchy-faced out-of-shape Bela Lugosi, cryogenically frozen for decades then thawed out in the sun and squeezed into a grubby suit. Patterson’s bad taste is even more apparent in television interviews, where Humphries answers questions in real time without a prepared script (or with a semi-prepared script he adapts to the occasion). On the television show Parkinson in 1981, with the actor Jackie Weaver and the politician Barry Jones, he enters drunk to make repeated lewd suggestions and use epithets like ‘poof,’ ‘hun,’ ‘nip,’ and ‘darky’ (‘Sir Les Patterson 1977–1981 (The Downunda Recordings)’). Michael Parkinson, his guests, and the studio audience laugh uproariously at this talk, and at Patterson’s description of arts grants as a means of ‘slinging the journos,’ because bet your life where you’ve got a journo – right? are you with me? – in his bottom drawer he’s got a poem, hasn’t he? Or a play, or a scenario. He’s got one of these in the bottom drawer. Sling him an arts grant, you see? He’ll be sweet for good. Patterson is odious in his personality but not in the impact of that personality, which is extruded through a comic sensibility giving both Humphries and his audience license to laugh at words and actions which in other situations would be judged rank and unacceptable (Quintero 9). In comic performance, governed by certain cultural expectations, they are judged not so, or seen as a satirical attack on these same words and actions. This register of interpretation, however, is neither stable nor clear cut. What is the difference between a performance that is racist, sexist, and homophobic, and a performance that is about racism, sexism, and homophobia? In what ways is the latter enjoyable, and what is the complicity of spectators in the tainted views being satirised? What happens when a performance stops being enjoyable, and the register of interpretation fissiparates, leaving its content bereft of comic spin? The failure of a work that seeks to deal with subjects and language widely considered transgressive comes at a double cost: not only will it be judged artistically inadequate, it will be socially condemned. This is, in fact, what happened to Les Patterson Saves the World, a film that cost A$7.3 million but grossed only $665,000 in ticket sales, and whose Australian premiere was such a debacle that according to cinema critic David Stratton, ‘it is still rumoured in the industry today that federal treasurer Paul Keating, who attended, was so angry that he decided to end rorts in the film industry.’ Thus was the tax concession for Australian cinema revoked, while Patterson’s offensiveness – or the failure of his offensiveness – prompted a government response that punished an entire industry. Keating’s negative feelings are understandable. Was it possible to satirically portray a disfiguring virus while the nation was in the grip of a real-life AIDS epidemic that was harming 86

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and killing hundreds of people (see Timewell, Minichiello, and Plummer)? Are there limits to the list of legitimate targets for offensive performance? If so, how are these to be ascertained? Now that AIDS is a treatable disease, and the number of cases in Australia has dropped significantly, is Les Patterson Saves the World funny in a way it was not when first presented in 1987? As a directly observable quality, ‘offensiveness’ is less often associated with 1970s Australian drama than the trifecta of immediacy of theme, a crowd-pleasing populism and an upending of conventional ideas of theatrical form (Meyrick, See How it Runs 7–15; Meyrick, Australian Theatre after the New Wave 108–114). Retrospectively describing the group of ‘New Wave’ playwrights who appeared at the end of the 1960s, John McCallum comments: They were a group of mostly young, educated, middle-class men – rebellious larrikins swept up in the new nationalistic fervour and the social and political upheaval of the period. They wanted to get the individual and social issues of the world they were experiencing onto the stage – including the polarisation of the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution and the emergence of a globalised media culture. They wanted to appropriate and rework Australian history, reclaiming popular theatrical traditions that their immediate theatrical forebears had dismissed as vulgar and commercial. Many of them were left wing but, aside from a brief surge of agitprop … they tended not to engage seriously with politics. (139) A similar picture emerges from interviews conducted with Australian playwrights by Jennifer Palmer in 1979. ‘No dramatist, with the exception of Dorothy Hewett, conceded to a position of social commitment … Australian drama which invites recognition without being disturbing was generally considered appropriate,’ she noted (11). Yet, despite such disavowals, questions linger about whether offensiveness was a significant trait of the diverse theatre that emerged at this time. The comic character of Patterson might serve as a marker in the bloodstream of Australian drama, highlighting the contentious issue of contentiousness itself. There were a number of awkward positions a play might find itself occupying: intending offence and giving it, as with Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed (premiere 1967) or Louis Nowra’s Visions (premiere 1978); not intending offence, but giving it nonetheless, as with Jack Hibberd’s The Les Darcy Show (premiere 1971) or John Romeril’s The Floating World (premiere 1971); not intending offence but being retrospectively endowed with it, as, we will argue, is the case with Steve Spears’s The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (premiere 1976); and not intending offence specifically, but being cast in a broader context that attributes a taint-by-association, such as recent revelations by Hewett’s daughters that she facilitated their sexual abuse as children, which has undoubtedly affected the status of her drama (see, for example, Nichols, Carmody, Jervis-Read). Matters are made even more complicated by the fact that the notion of ‘a broader context’ is a constantly shifting set of parameters impossible to pin down in a definitive way. What gave offence to the point of criminal prosecution in 1969 – saying the word ‘cunt’ on stage – was used unremarkably in Traitors ten years later (premiere 1979). Forty years on from Stephen Sewell’s play, the term is censorable once more, if for different reasons (see Miller, ‘Ruling’). Neither the world nor the theatre stay still, and the register of interpretation in which offence resides reflects thoughts and feelings that always exist in a charged and normative way. If offence is taken, is offence necessarily given? Are judgements about offensiveness final? Who gets to decide, artists or audiences? Should theatre give offence? Is it, from time to time, even obliged to? Such questions open up the complex terrain of how drama impacts as a live performance experience. The value of a play is not separable from the values of the society in which it is created, for which it is intended, and to which it is presented. The mode of understanding that conditions its occurrence is bound by a moment in time that, once passed, rarely pertains in full implication. The Australian government once banned the word ‘bloody’ from the stage. Fifty years later, it used it in a national tourism campaign. 87

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In respect of the 1970s, it is, perhaps, less a matter of the Australian plays of the period being popular rather than offensive, than ideas of offensiveness changing and rendering its drama more popular. The first part of this chapter excerpts the formal aspect of this transformation: the struggle against censorship. Australian theatre was a leading player in this campaign because of its public nature. By the early 1970s, it was a struggle all but over. Many of the writers Palmer interviewed were aware of the seismic change and the new freedom it entailed. If they saw theatre as a vehicle for ‘delight in recognition [rather than] provok[ing] critical consideration of the moral stance expressed’ (Palmer 11), it is because to all intents and purposes the moral stance of the New Wave had by then won out. The second part of the chapter considers the issue of offensiveness analytically, as a constant in the theatre-audience relationship. The focus is its function in drama, what role it has in assaying stories, characters, language, and images that may be important to publicly articulate despite being socially censurable. The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (premiere 1976) is chosen as the concluding object of this discussion, a play about the relationship between a cross-dressing voice teacher and his young male student, with slight paedophilic overtones. This monodrama, staged in the middle of the 1970s, was one of the most successful of the decade, touring to both the United Kingdom and the United States, and winning a number of national and international awards (see Meyrick, See How It Runs for an extended description). Last performed in 2002, it has had no production since. But what, if any, is the value of such a play to the contemporary repertoire? This reflects the larger issue of whether the brash attitude of much 1970s Australian drama – what Hewett, describing Humphries, called ‘a lack of sympathy and tenderness … [that is] very cruel … but very accurate’ (qtd in Palmer 96) – demonstrates a creative audacity eclipsed when ‘not giving offence’ is taken as a chief desideratum of the theatre experience.

‘Those Days’: Censorship and the 1960s It’s hard to recall those days exactly because it is quite a long time ago now and one tends to live in the present. (Seymour qtd in Palmer 57) In those days, of course, we had the writers but very few people writing for the theatre, there was no money in it. (Lawler qtd in Palmer 34) The long story of the struggle against censorship in Australian theatre peaked in Melbourne in the mid-1960s (see Dutton and Harris). By 1965, Henry Bolte had been Victorian Premier for 11 years. A conservative Liberal, he was in favour of stiffer penalties for crime, a supporter of the death penalty (the last man executed in Australia, Ronald Ryan, was hanged during his term of office) and opposed to relaxing the laws on censorship. Under his leadership the Summary Offences Act 1966 (VIC) was enacted. It had operated under different names in Australia since white settlement and had been on the statute books in almost the same form since 1865. The revised Act contained provisions relating to a wide variety of offences, including serious matters such as assault, trespassing, resisting arrest, making false report, and property damage. It also contained provisions for less serious matters, such as homing pigeons, kite-flying, and singing bawdy ballads. It rapidly became the bible of the Victorian Police Vice Squad as they upheld the conservative mores of the government and the Melbourne establishment. For the remainder of the 1960s the Vice Squad would keep close watch over the activities of Melbourne theatre-makers. By the end of 1966, Vice Squad visits to the theatre were so common that they were mentionable in theatre reviews (such as Howard Palmer’s coverage of A Cup of Tea, a Bex and a Good Lie Down [1966], starring Gloria Dawn and Reg Livermore, where he claimed that when the Vice Squad visited ‘they will laugh so much they will forget why they went’ [18]). 88

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Under Bolte, the understanding of offensiveness achieved an extraordinary degree of attenuation. In San Francisco, two actors were charged with ‘lewd or dissolute conduct in a public place’ for appearing in The Beard, a controversial play exploring the nature of seduction and attraction. The play text was published in October 1967 in the literary magazine The Evergreen Review. In December 1968, Stefan Mager appeared in a St Kilda court charged with having made an obscene article for copying the play from The Evergreen Review, despite it being readily available from the State Library of Victoria. Mager’s theatre company, Contact Theatre, had intended to produce the play before an invited audience. The Vice Squad raided Mager’s flat on warrant, ‘turning it upside down’ despite the fact that he had already handed over the two copies he had made. The production never eventuated (Hall 3). America Hurrah! by Jean-Claude van Itallie (1967) was the next play to be shut down by the Vice Squad who objected to a symbolic sex act and two four-letter words. In response the sister-in-law of the producer, Don Munro, hosted a private showing for invited guests at her home (‘They’ll Show that Play in Private’). It was well attended by press and politicians. After two days the Vice Squad turned up to question her, and even the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Holding, who was in attendance. An editorial in The Age expressed its dismay: A private performance for adults in a living room seems to us to take the matter outside the legitimate interests of the Vice Squad. We suggest that the Vice Squad, the Victoria Police, and the State Government should stop this nonsense at once. They are making fools of themselves which may be their own business. Unfortunately, they are acting in the name of all of us, and that is everyone’s business. (‘Vice Squad Hurrah’) In July 1969 Graeme Blundell and Lindsay Smith were charged with obscenity for staging Norm and Ahmed at La Mama, and the struggle against censorship started to intensify. The play had been produced at the Old Tote in Sydney and Twelfth Night in Brisbane without incident. In Melbourne the closing line of the play, ‘fucking boong,’ attracted the attention of the police. Smith, the actor, was convicted on obscenity charges for using the word ‘fucking’ and Blundell, the director, for aiding and abetting him. No objection was raised about the use of the word ‘boong’ (Hack 9). The following year, Harry M. Miller’s production of The Boys in the Band opened at Playbox Theatre. The play, by US playwright Mart Crowley, depicts a venomous birthday party held by a young gay man. Constable Bernard Farrelly charged three actors with obscenity for the use of four four-letter words (‘Four Ways to Say It’). The magistrate, D.J. Kelly, did not record a conviction as he thought the offences ‘were of such a trifling nature as to not warrant punishment,’ noting ‘a conviction in this case would leave this city and this State a laughing stock.’ However, the Crown obtained an order to review the case and the Supreme Court recorded convictions against all three actors. Miller described it as ‘a dreadful waste of public money’ and stated that the ‘public who buy tickets are the arbiters. People never buy tickets to rubbish and they never will.’ Thumbing his nose at the government, he announced that he would next produce the controversial musical Hair (‘Now for Hair’; for extended discussion of this musical, see Meyrick, See How It Runs 39–44). As a result of such actions, defiance started brewing in Melbourne’s theatre community. On 16 December 1969 a ‘collective discussion’ took place in a back garden in Carlton. Present were members of the Australian Performing Group (APG), Graeme Blundell, Lindsay Smith, Jack Hibberd, Alexander Buzo, and John Romeril, as well as the journalist John Larkin who reported the meeting in his column in The Age under the title ‘Headed for a 4-Letter Paradise.’ Those present ‘acknowledged the situation between them and the authorities has reached a state of confrontation … They have said that they will keep writing and keep playing and keep being arrested’ (2). Later that week the APG performed a short play by Romeril entitled Whatever 89

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Happened to Realism? (AusStage event 102830). The drama parodied the irrationality of censorship and its effects in the theatre, not only on practitioners but also audiences. It culminated in an explosive and repeated use of four-letter words. On 20 December, four days after the meeting in Carlton, nine APG actors were arrested and charged with obscenity during a performance of the play, including Bruce Spence, Peter Cummins and John Duigan (‘9 Actors Charged’). The audience marched to the police station alongside the actors as they were led away, chanting the play’s four-letter words aloud. Eventually, police reinforcements had to be called in. Meanwhile, Miller was pressing on with his production of Hair. He had shrewdly used the controversy of the show to generate advance publicity in Sydney and also ran a number of previews for invited guests prior to the public opening. The New South Wales Chief Secretary, Eric Willis, the person with control over theatrical productions in the state at this time, was invited to one of these previews. Miller minimised the shock of the nude scene at that performance by keeping it to 40 seconds, commenting ‘if you’d dropped your programme on the floor you wouldn’t have seen it’ (qtd in ‘HAIR: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical’). The show, a runaway success, ran in Sydney’s Kings Cross without intervention for nearly two years. When it opened on 21 May 1971 at the Metro Theatre in Bourke Street, Melbourne, the Vice Squad were notable by their absence and raised no objection despite the production’s use of full-frontal nudity and plenty of four-letter words. The only legal incident was Miller’s breach of Council fire regulations for permitting a naked flame on stage when the theatre was open to the public. The case was quickly thrown out, the Magistrate doubting whether a candle in a crucible constituted a naked flame. Miller complained that ‘the Council has spent enough money on this case to feed 600 pensioners for a week’ (‘Miller Wins’). The production ran until February 1972. In August, Bolte was replaced as Victorian Premier by the progressive Sir Rupert Hamer. In November, Gough Whitlam was elected the first Labor Prime Minister of Australia in 23 years. The Vice Squad turned its attention away from theatre, and the New Wave’s audacious theatrical sensibility installed itself as a new norm. ‘Gradually and inevitably [the New Wave’s] style has begun to creep into all serious theatre,’ noted Peter Holloway, This broad, loud, extremely agile and all-enveloping theatricality is reaching out into the theatres which have protected themselves from it for so long, bringing a vitality that is totally Australian … [A]ll emphasise the kind of impressionist writing which depends much more on rhythm – the rhythms of Australian life and its speech – than on theme or construction. It is to be found in the plays of Rodney Milgate, Jack Hibberd, Alexander Buzo, John Romeril, Dorothy Hewett, Rob Inglis and Stanley Walsh of the Sydney Music Hall. They are rorty, wasteful, intensely colloquial scripts and they make one realise how foreign is clever construction, eloquence and precision to this country. They also show, to an awesome degree, how rich, vivid and accurate our colloquial tongue is. For years we have called ourselves inarticulate because we do not as a nation speak the tongue that Sir Robert Menzies speaks. (94–95)

Beyond the Four-Letter-Word Play: Types of Offensiveness in 1970s Drama Figure 9.1 shows the quantitative increase in spoken-word drama and Australian spoken-word drama in Australian theatre during the 1970s.1 By 1979, productions of the latter had grown by over 400%, and by 1982 over 600%. From 1972 onwards, as a proportion of the national repertoire, Australian drama was rarely less than one-third and sometimes more than half of all those produced annually. Such figures suggest that the question of the register of interpretation of Australian plays is significant when assessing the character of Australian theatre in the decade overall. It may be difficult to generalise about a historically evolved, geographically dispersed, socially complex art form, but the larger change Holloway notes sweeping through Australian drama 90

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Figure 9.1 Spoken word drama and Australian spoken word drama, 1970–1982

during the period demands some explanation. Table 9.1 lists all Australian New Wave writers with more than three plays professionally produced in the decade. The list is neither definitive nor robust, as it takes no account of scale of production or length of run, while historical descriptors are often meaningless from the point of view of the individual artist (as Peter Fitzpatrick observes, none of these writers felt themselves to be part of a ‘wave’ or movement [50]). Despite this, it is possible to identify qualities within the work produced by these writers that reflect offensiveness as an intended or consequent effect. First, there are plays which assay narratives, characters and situations of government power and control that can be identified as politically offensive. These include early popular musicals like Michael Boddy and John Ellis’s The Legend of King O’Malley (premiere 1970), about the larrikin politician and founder of the Commonwealth Bank, as well as later realist works like Traitors, about Stalin’s liquidation of his Trotskyist opponents, a harbinger of Sewell’s ‘internationalist’ dramas of the 1980s, The Blind Giant is Dancing (premiere 1983) and Dreams in an Empty City (premiere 1986). In this decade, the work of John Romeril – Chicago, Chicago (premiere 1971), Bastardy (premiere 1972), The Floating World (premiere 1974), and The Radio-active Show (premiere 1977) – is the most representative of the category, Dennis Carroll describing it as ‘the most important body of propagandistic political theatre to be written in Australia since the early 1940s’ (253). Next, there is naturalistic drama of an observational kind that might be labelled sociologically offensive. This category would include the major plays of David Williamson in the period, The Removalists (premiere 1971), Don’s Party (premiere 1973), The Department (premiere 1977), and The Club (premiere 1978), as well as works such as John Powers’s The Last of the Knucklemen (premiere 1974), about a gang of violent miners working in the outback, Alma De Groen’s Coming Home (premiere 1977), about expatriate artists deciding to return to Australasia, and the prison plays of Jim McNeill, The Chocolate Frog (premiere 1972), How Does Your Garden Grow? (premiere 1976), and Jack (premiere 1978). Closely allied to this category, but distinguished from it by a willingness to exaggerate and distort for satirical ends, are works subverting the expectations of sentimental comedy and portraying acts of grossness, rudeness or embarrassment. They include the oeuvre of Humphries, and the major plays of Hibberd in the period, particularly Dimboola (premiere 1969–1970) with its wince-making portrayal of a regional wedding, and A Stretch of the Imagination (premiere 1973), with its scatological humour. This category might be called plays of (bad) manners. Fourth, there is drama potentially giving racial or sexual offence. The former includes 91

Julian Meyrick and Jenny Fewster Table 9.1 Australian Playwrights with Three or More Plays Professionally Produced in the 1970s Last Name

First Name

AusStage URL

Bakaitis Battye Biehler Blair Boddy Bradshaw Buzo Colubriale Compton Copland Cove Davis de Groen Dickins Ellis Enright Esson Fisher Fotheringham George Hewett Hibberd Hopgood Hopkinson Humphries Hutchinson Kenna Lawler Livermore McNeil Nowra Oakley Pinne Pulvers Radic Reed Romeril Ross Ryan Seymour Spears Triffitt Tulloch

Helmut Don Ray Ron Michael Richard Alexander Greg Jennifer Murray Michael Jack Alma Barry Bob Nick Louis Rodney Richard Rob Dorothy Jack Alan Simon Barry George Peter Ray Reg Jim Louis Barry Peter Roger Leonard Bill John Kenneth Colin Alan Steve J. Nigel Richard

https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/590 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/230679 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/227958 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/607 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/3369 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/225863 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/457 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/258211 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/225944 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/2351 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/225671 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/144 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/277 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/417 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/3370 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/2977 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/225443 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/644 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/447 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/227054 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/265 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/638 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/1369 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/932 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/228608 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/228702 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/225494 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/181 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/1828 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/4914 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/432 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/4 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/230680 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/2152 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/28 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/225880 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/462 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/225835 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/586 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/323 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/329 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/460 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/359

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First Name

AusStage URL

Whitcomb White Williamson Young (Yang)

Eleanor Patrick David William

https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/226170 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/179 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/2 https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/248183

one of the seminal plays of the 1970s, Norm and Ahmed (even though it was written in 1966), Steve J. Spears’s ‘racist vaudeville’ Africa (premiere 1974), Bill Reed’s ‘workshop production’ Truganinni (premiere 1970), about the genocide of the Aboriginal population in colonial Tasmania, and the National Black Theatre productions, Basically Black (premiere 1972) and Here Comes the Nigger (premiere 1976). The latter includes the major plays of Hewett in the period, The Chapel Perilous (premiere 1971), Bon Bons and Roses for Dolly (premiere 1972), The Tatty Hollow Story (premiere 1976), and The Golden Oldies (premiere 1977), but not The Man from Mukinupin (premiere 1979), which demonstrates a reconciliatory feel at odds with the quality of offensiveness being discussed here. Last, there are plays which in mood, image, length, or production circumstances are offensive in a non-specific but nevertheless discernible way, of which Nowra’s Albert Names Edward (premiere 1976), Inner Voices (premiere 1977), and Visions (premiere 1978) are perhaps the best examples. These five categories of offensiveness suggest the range of rebarbative subject matters, sensibilities, and styles mobilised by Australian playwrights in the 1970s. They are not mutually exclusive. Hewett’s preoccupation with sexual freedom was seen – and was intended to be seen – as resonant of the broader radical politics associated with second-wave feminism. McNeill’s How Does Your Garden Grow? contains a confronting exploration of gender roles and threatened masculine identity. Hibberd’s use of Australian vernacular in Dimboola and A Stretch of the Imagination allies with plays of sociological observation, even though he deploys his language skills to non-naturalistic ends. Nor is the quality of offensiveness a matter of straight forward classification. It is a rare play that intends to give offence for the sake of it (though Norm and Ahmed might qualify), and a non-existent one that gives offence and nothing but. As many of these works were staged by non-mainstream or ‘alternative’ theatre companies, like the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney or the Australian Performing Group in Melbourne, questions arise about audiences, and what productions and receptions should be considered representative of a play’s impact (Milne 1–3). The Chapel Perilous was brilliantly successful when it opened on the thrust stage of the New Fortune Theatre in Perth in 1971 (AusStage event signifier 72855). It was largely disastrous when presented on the proscenium arch of the Opera House Drama Theatre in Sydney in 1974 (AusStage event 5667). A generational split among Australian theatregoers is also discernible from play reviews and complaints in newspaper letter pages, suggesting a difference in expectations between younger and older cohorts. What gave offence to one type of spectator brought pleasure and delight to another. Sometimes, it seems, offending one type of spectator added to the pleasure and delight of another. Yet despite these caveats and qualifications – and bearing in mind that 1970s drama is a corpus larger than individual plays written by individual playwrights – a common spirit of pugnacity flows through much of this work. Perhaps this is less a quality of offensiveness per se, than a willingness to risk giving offence in order to achieve certain dramatic ends. To phrase this more precisely: in the work of Romeril, Hewett, Williamson, De Groen, Hibberd, and so on, one can detect an indifference to the need to not give offence, and a freedom implicitly claimed, as a result,

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that no words, images, characters or stories should be considered off limits. This freedom is closely allied with another: the right to tackle words, images, characters and stories in a full and frank way, to let theatre assay contestable ideas and opinions as a matter of right, and to defend that right as indefeasible. In Hibberd’s call-to-arms essay, ‘Wanted: A Display of Shanks’ (1970), he argued: An intelligent, radical and uncouth theatre is required, a theatre that is rich, relevant and ribald … The laceration of bourgeois sensibilities should not be the prime aim. These will be lashed in passing should the central tasks be tackled … Moral and aesthetic outrage will be the order of the day. The new theatricals will have to fight for the essential morality of their drama and not be seduced into bearing the false banners of liberal permissiveness. If the new drama is not deeply imbued with moral and human responsibility, then the cause is lost, and the four-letter-word cause becomes a mere smoke-screen issue. When a play is a good, it is moral. Should such a play be banned, or legal action brought against it, then the defence must be heatedly moral, and the moral credentials of the prosecution must be deeply questioned. (qtd in Holloway 89) These sentiments capture the zeitgeist of Australian drama in the 1970s, one not explained by treating ‘delight’ and ‘moral stance’ as opposite values. Rather, a larger conception of cultural engagement, anchored on a playwright’s right to speak freely on all matters, in any way they chose, lent the theatre an imaginative courage that went beyond the need for positive audience response. If a play gave offence, so be it. This was a risk to be run in the search for a larger emancipation – political, sexual and imaginative – that Australians everywhere needed to embrace, whether they knew it or not.

Offence in Retrospect In concluding this chapter, one last category of offensiveness is worth considering: drama that when first presented was greeted with acclaim, but which might now be seen as problematic. Many New Wave plays met cries of outrage when they were staged 50 years ago. Which works from the period would be negatively received today, and what does this tell us about the way offensiveness operates in the theatre as a functional quality? The sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that in a society of saints, there will always be sinners (Durkheim and Lukes 62). Does the abrasion between ‘social integration’ and ‘moral regulation’ that he saw as an unavoidable feature of modern society ensure some drama will always give offence, that it is an inevitable part of the theatre-audience exchange? The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin is play that was well-received when it premiered at the Nimrod Theatre in 1976, with the actor Gordon Chater in the role of a gay, cross-dressing elocution teacher known in Spears’s text simply as the ‘Man.’ Spears’s obituary notes that Benjamin [Franklin] was to become one of the most successful plays ever produced in Australia … [It] toured nationally before major seasons in London, San Francisco and New York. [It] was nominated for a SWET (Society of West End Theatres) Award, a London Evening Standard Award and went on to win three OBIE (Off Broadway Awards) and the 1977 Major AWGIE Award. (George 22) Critics were lavish in their praise from the start, and the production was a box office ‘winner’ for the Nimrod company. It is hard to imagine the drama attracting such a positive response today, and more likely it would be judged offensive in subject matter and character portrayal. To understand why, it is important to look at the play itself.

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Benjamin Franklin is a three-act monodrama incorporating a number of unseen characters who impact on the life of the Man. Chief among them is his close friend, the stockbroker Bruce, a fellow cross-dresser, despite being a happily married husband and father. At the beginning of the play, the Man is introduced to Benjamin Franklin, a young boy with a stutter. His mother, Mrs Franklin, brings him to the Man’s flat, where over the course of a few months he privately coaches Benjamin to try to alleviate his speech impediment. The setting is the Melbourne suburb of Toorak, an important fact given that at the time of the play’s premiere, the legalisation of homosexuality was four years away in Victoria and eight years away in New South Wales. Full LGBT legislative equalisation across all Australian states and territories did not occur until 2003. The style and structure of the action of Benjamin Franklin is loosely realistic, moving forward in linear but sporadic fashion. Act 3, set in a mental hospital, is notionally eight years after Acts 1 and 2. The Man’s dialogue and interactions are similarly unstructured by precise convention. Sometimes he talks to Bruce or Benjamin as if they were standing in front of him; sometimes he talks to them on the phone, with the audience listening; sometimes he talks to the audience as if he were talking to himself; and sometimes he really does appear to talk to himself. The location of the action, however, is always the same: his Toorak flat. With ‘Luxaflex’ blinds drawn down, it becomes a retreat where the Man can dress in women’s clothes and masturbate to a picture of Mick Jagger. With Luxaflex blinds drawn up, it is the office where he tutors his well-connected Melbourne clients, ‘a big fat rich interwoven network of speech defects’ (Act 2). Midway through the play, the Man persuades Bruce to go to a gallery exhibition with him in their transvestite clothes. This becomes the catalyst for the eventual exposure of the Man as gay, his mildly violent retaliation when the police come to the flat to investigate, the discovery there of nude photographs of Benjamin, and the sectioning of the Man as a danger to himself and others. The story ends with the Man, dubbed by the media ‘The Transvestite Terror of Toorak,’ failing in yet another bid to be released from mental hospital. He is a talk-back radio cause celebre, attracting divided opinions in the community, some considering him ‘a harmless old man who has been denied his rights under Section Nine of the Australian Bill of Rights,’ and others ‘[an] animal [who] should be locked away forever for [his] own good as much as society’s’ (Act 3). In the closing moments of the play, the voices of the radio callers merge with the Man’s cries for help and it is strongly implied that his treatment at the hands of society and the health system has damaged his mind as well as taken away his liberty. Described in this way The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin presents as a parable of gay oppression, the Man’s homosexuality and transvestism provoking unjustified prejudice, social rejection, and legal sanction. A partial backstory suggests the Man is a would-be actor, is firmly in the closet, and has an active Catholic conscience despite his professed atheism. His essential harmlessness is underscored numerous times, and while he fires a shotgun at the end of Act 2 when the police arrive, it is only at the cuckoo clock on the wall of his flat. The sub-narrative around Benjamin is the cause of potential retrospective offence. First, there is the matter of Benjamin’s age: he is only 12 years old. During the course of the play, the Man shows the young boy how to correct his speech by placing his hands on his body from time to time. He also gives him cigarettes. The 12-year-old is presented as sexually precocious, and within the register of interpretation operative in the 1970s this is obviously intended to be a source of audience humour. Talking to Bruce in Act 1, for example, the Man says: ‘This kid’s fucked more women than I have. He’s going around with an older lady now. She’s 16 and works at Mum’s hairdressing salon.’ And in Act 2: Anyway, apparently, the hairdresser had the clap! Yes! And Benjamin had to sneak down to the VD clinic after cricket on Saturday. Hahahaha. Then … then … He found out he … had crabs too! Hahahahaha. And his Mum can’t understand why he doesn’t want her to get his hair cut there anymore! Hahahahaha.

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A short while later, the Man starts acting as Benjamin’s theatrical agent and takes photographs of the boy in the flat. Then, in a telephone conversation with Mrs Franklin, it is revealed the hairdresser with whom Benjamin is having sex is actually a man. Finally, Benjamin offers the Man nude photographs he has taken of himself, and the Man comments, ‘Jesus … The little bastard’s trying to seduce me.’ In conversation with the boy, he says, Listen, I’m flattered that you should want to interfere with me and if you were old enough to know what you were doing or, more importantly, old enough for the cops and lawyers and judges and parliamentarians to say you were old enough to know what you were doing, then it would be different. I’d probably make like the proverbial rat. But you’re not. You’re a kid. You’re the sort of kid they have on TV to sell Crazy Maze and Kellogg’s Cornflakes. You’re the sort of kid that judges and juries want to protect form perverts. Capisce? Within the play it is made clear that there is no sexual relationship between the Man and Benjamin, and that the Man has no intention of initiating one. Shy of this, however, his comments are presumptive (‘I want to crack that stutter and move on to drama. Honestly, with his looks and my talent, he could be great’) and prurient (‘Don’t forget, that bum of yours is a time bomb’). In Act 3, Benjamin, now 20, is presented as an up-and-coming actor, with an active gay sex life and fond memories of the Man, to whom he writes affectionately: I know you have always forbade me … to involve myself in your case, but, if this appeal fails, I’m going to swear out an affidavit saying that I supplied you with the infamous ‘young boy with a banana’ photos. They can’t hurt me now anyway … [and] it might be good publicity. To the extent that Benjamin has a character story beyond that of appendage to the Man’s narrative, it is as a shallow, manipulative, and feckless youth, with charm and good looks and a warm but selfish nature. In the wake of the 2013 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, and subsequent state-based responses to its revelations, the broader context for Benjamin Franklin’s register of interpretation has changed drastically from when it was first staged. A character who once seemed comic and endearing would now likely appear as crude and insensitive. A narrative that read as progressive in its treatment of one kind of social problem would now read as complicit in another. In short, the play would probably be received as offensive. It may even seem unimaginable, knowing what the Australian public knows today, that Benjamin Franklin was ever acceptable, just as playing Shakespeare’s Othello (c. 1603) in ‘blackface’ is unthinkable to audiences supportive of multi-racial casting. This judgement is not certain. The only way to test it is to stage the play and observe the response it elicits. Nevertheless, it is almost certain that some aspects of Spears’s drama would be seen as expressive of a certain period blindness. Yet it is worth asking whether this is reason enough to neglect the play, whether the risk of giving offence outweighs the other ends that might be achieved if it were produced. And here a cultural fault line is observable. The difference between 1970s and post-millennium theatre is more than choice of play. The whole attitude of the New Wave was strongly encouraging of putting contentious material on stage. This was both a legacy of its anti-censorship struggles, which entailed a libertarian commitment to freedom of expression, and the result of its own idea of theatre as a place where strong opinions should be exposed to the public gaze, rather than one in which ‘correct’ views, whatever these might be, were promulgated. This permissive credo needs to be seen in context. It was not one promoting the giving of offence as a matter of course; nor one promoting the giving of offence outside the cultural expectations 96

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of the theatre. Rather, the theatre was conceived as a place of risk in which it was possible, acceptable, and laudable to explore material that was unpalatable, unpopular, or provocative outside it; that in the search for deeper truths, whether these were personal or political, the assaying of threshold stories, characters, language, and images was both necessary and important, even at the risk of audience censure. When considering the place of Australian 1970s drama in the repertoire today, it may be argued that what has changed is not so much the nature of drama, as the expectations around the audience-theatre relationship, which condition its reception. It is hard to imagine a willingness today to see audience disapproval not as a mark of failure, but as the by-product of a confrontational relationship playwrights should embrace as a matter of course. Though, this belief still animates the work of some Australian artists: As we enter the lift, Barry Humphries tells me how lucky he has been and how much he is looking forward to the future – particularly reviving Sir Les. ‘I defend to the ultimate my right to give deep and profound offence.’ He pauses. ‘So long as people laugh while they’re being offended.’ And do they laugh as much nowadays? ‘Oh yes, of course they do.’ A young woman enters the lift. Humphries discreetly raises his hat. She doesn’t notice that one of the world’s great provocateurs has just paid his respects. (Hattenstone)

Note

Works Cited ‘9 Actors Charged with Obscenity.’ Age 22 Dec. 1969: 1. Buckmaster, Luke. ‘Les Patterson Saves the World Rewatched: A Spectacular Turkey.’ Guardian 18 Oct. 2015. . Carmody, Broede. ‘Dorothy Hewett’s Daughters Say Grown Men Preyed on Them as Children.’ Sydney Morning Herald 11 Jun. 2018. . Carroll, Dennis. Australian Contemporary Drama, 1909–1982: A Critical Introduction. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Durkheim, Emile, and Steven Lukes. The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. London: Macmillan, 1982. Dutton, Geoffrey, and Max Harris, ed. Australia’s Censorship Crisis. Melbourne, VIC: Sun, 1970. Fitzpatrick, Peter. After ‘The Doll’: Australian Drama since 1955. Melbourne, VIC: Edward Arnold, 1979. ‘Four Ways to Say It, but One Offends.’ Age 11 Jul. 1969: 3. George, Rob. ‘Vale Steve J. Spears: Obituary.’ Storyline 21 (2008): 22. Hack, Iola. ‘SM Watched Actor Say “-Boongs.”’ Age 24 Jul. 1969: 9. ‘HAIR: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical.’ MILESAGO: Australasian Music and Pop Culture, 1964–1975. Nd. . Hall, Stephen. ‘Vice Police Seize Scripts of Play.’ Age 23 Aug. 1968: 3. Hattenstone, Simon. ‘Barry Humphries: I Defend to the Ultimate My Right to Give Deep and Profound Defence.’ Guardian 11 Jul. 2018. . Hibberd, Jack. ‘Wanted: A Display of Shanks.’ Contemporary Australian Drama. Ed. Peter Holloway. 2nd ed. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 1987. 89–90. Holloway, Peter, ed. Contemporary Australian Drama: Perspectives since 1955. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 1981.

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Julian Meyrick and Jenny Fewster Humphries, Barry. My Gorgeous Life: An Adventure. Sydney, NSW: Macmillan, 1989. ———. Neglected Poems. North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1991. ———. My Life as Me: A Memoir. Camberwell, VIC: Viking, 2002. Jervis-Read, Jane. ‘“With Complexity”: Growing Up With Dorothy Hewett.’ Meanjin 20 Aug. 2018. . McCallum, John. Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 2009. Meyrick, Julian. See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 2002. ———. Australian Theatre after the New Wave: Policy, Subsidy and the Alternative Artist. Amsterdam: Brill, 2017. Miller, George T., dir. Les Patterson Saves the World. Hoyts, 1987. Miller, Kelsey. ‘The Ruling in this Friends Lawsuit Set Back the #MeToo Movement by Years – Now the Woman at the Centre of it Speaks Out.’ Bustle 24 Oct. 2018. . ‘Miller Wins over that Burning “Hair” Candle.’ Age 26 Jan. 1972: 3. Milne, Geoffrey. Theatre Australia (Un)Limited: Australian Theatre since the 1950s. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Nichols, Claire. ‘Dorothy Hewett’s Daughters Rozanna and Kate Talk about Re-Casting their Mum’s Image in the Age of #MeToo.’ ABC News 21 Jun. 2018. . ‘Now for Hair, says Producer.’ Age 29 Jul. 1969: 2. Nowra, Louis. Visions. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 1979. Palmer, Howard. ‘Rev. A Cup of Tea, a Bex, and a Good Lie Down.’ Age 22 Sept. 1966: 18. Palmer, Jennifer. Contemporary Australian Playwrights. Adelaide, SA: Adelaide U Union P, 1979. Pender, Anne. ‘No More Please: Barry Humphries and Australian English.’ Journal of Australian Studies 25.68 (2001): 160–166. ———. One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries. Sydney, NSW: ABC, 2010. Quintero, Ruben. A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. ‘Sir Les Patterson, 1977–1981 (The Downunda Recordings).’ Nd. YouTube . Spears, Steve J. The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin; When They Send Me Three and Fourpence. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 1989. St Pierre, Matthew. A Portrait of the Artist as Australian. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2014. Stratton, David. The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry. Chippendale, NSW: Pan Macmillan, 1990. ‘They’ll Show that Play in Private.’ Age 8 Aug. 1968: 9. Timewell, Eric, Victor Minichiello, and David Plummer, ed. AIDS in Australia: Context and Practice. Sydney, NSW: Prentice Hall, 1992. Van Itallie, Jean Claude. Five Short Plays: America Hurrah; Interview; TV, Motel; War; Almost Like Being. London: Penguin, 1967. ‘Vice Squad Hurrah.’ Age 19 Aug. 1968: 5.

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10 AROUND 1988 Australian Literature, History, and the Bicentenary Eduardo Marks de Marques

It is fair to state that one of the most important and heated debates in twentieth-century Australia, both inside and outside academia, is the constitution of the nation’s identity. Were Australians to be seen as the result of a miscegenating convergence of many European (with a certain centrality of British values) and native cultures or should Australians be acknowledged as the result of a powerful resistance against such miscegenation? Both discourses circulated somewhat freely and strongly, especially from the second half of that century; however, it was Russel Ward’s normative account of the constructive elements of the typical Australia that was more deeply embedded in the nation’s imagination. Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958) claims that the Australian national identity is formed by the convergence of a cultural and biological Anglo-Saxon heritage and what he refers to as a unique Australian construction of masculinity, based on notions of mateship, egalitarianism, and (implicit, though questioned) heterosexuality. With the advent of both the New Left and second-wave feminism in Australia, though, Ward’s ideas came under intense attack and dissent brought to the table a disruption of the Wardian formative elements of national identity, bringing as a result a displacement of the central, ‘typical’ Australian that made other dissenting identities (women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and other ethnicities) invisible. The grounds for a policy of multiculturalism were laid and the questioning of an Australian monocultural identity would be at the centre of the most important celebratory event of the end of the twentieth century: the Bicentenary of the arrival of the First Fleet, which marked the official beginning of British colonisation of Australia. The Bicentenary was set to be the biggest nationwide festivity of the Australian people at that time as it would be the first celebration of national identity post-Federation. The Centenary, in 1888, still reflected the colonial mindset of the late nineteenth century, and the celebrations of the sesquicentenary addressed only tangentially the discussions of national identity (Macintyre 95). Thus, in 1979, the Malcolm Fraser Coalition government (1975–1983) created the Australian Bicentennial Authority (ABA), which was to be the central authority for every celebration involving the Bicentenary, at national, state, and local levels. The creation of the ABA represented an important moment of bipartisan unity amid an ongoing energy crisis, and this political unity guaranteed an autonomous status to the Authority, legally separate from government. However, such independence was far from real. Indeed, the ABA had already been created under certain conditions. Under Gough Whitlam (1972–1975), Australia had placed a bid to host the 1988 World Expo. Whitlam wanted the Expo to become a Bicentennial event, one which would also force the nation to deliver a mature take on its national identity, and eventually occupy a leading position in the South Pacific region. However, the Fraser Coalition government questioned 99

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whether the money invested in hosting such an event would be better invested elsewhere, to a more direct benefit of the nation and its then roughly 14 million inhabitants. Fraser’s view was defeated in Parliament, Brisbane hosted the 1988 World Expo, and it was the role of the ABA to create the connecting tissue between it and the many other festivities to follow. The next major challenge for the Authority was to find the most appropriate theme for the Bicentenary. Under Fraser, the initial theme was to be ‘The Australian Achievement’ which, as George Shaw states, was the projection of a modernised Australia, whose role as an industrial leader for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific regions was long overdue (1–2). However, under Bob Hawke’s Labor government (1983–1991), the theme was immediately replaced by ‘Living Together,’ which was to be focussed on the future, stressing Australia’s racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Such a change was not merely a shift from a political and economic view of the nation to a social historical one: Fraser’s view of Australia was primarily geopolitical whereas Hawke’s was used to promote and weave a sense of social equality among all Australians in an attempt to establish a multicultural agenda for the turn of the century, which would mean a reassessment of the nation’s treatment of non-Anglo identities. However, Hawke’s ‘Living Together’ plan failed; among the many reasons that can be pointed out for such a failure, two in particular deserve discussion. The first reason for the failure of Hawke’s ‘Living Together’ plan was the ABA’s inability to approach and deal with Australian multiculturalism. Dr David Patrick, the Chief Executive Officer appointed by Fraser, found inspiration and counsel in Canada, whose centenary had been celebrated in 1967, when Dr Patrick was living there. He firmly believed that the Canadian paradigms for the understanding of its multicultural society would work in Australia and this fed waves of criticism, especially in Parliament, from both Coalition and Labor MPs who believed either that Australian multiculturalism was irrelevant or that it was so unique that Australian paradigms needed to be developed for its understanding, respectively. But the second, most important reason was Prime Minister Hawke’s attempt to use the Bicentenary as an arena to foster Labor’s policy of Reconciliation despite the ABA’s failure to approach Aboriginal leaders for their insight and support for inclusion until the end of 1986. Only when Aboriginal activists called for a boycott did the government initiate a dialogue with them. But it was too late: by September 1987, an entire alternative programme to the Bicentenary (or, as Aboriginal activists put it, then, an anti-Bicentenary programme) had been put together under the theme ‘We Have Survived.’ In fact, the relationship between the ABA, at both national and regional levels, and Aboriginal leaders and activists, was problematic throughout the 1980s and is symptomatic of the state of race relations in Australia. It became clear that Anglo-Australians would either acknowledge Indigenous Australians as one numerous though cohesive mass of individuals, disregarding their many different tribal, cultural, and linguistic groups or, simply, ignore their presence at all, removing them from the spectrum of Australian national identity. Both approaches were used as part of the anti-Bicentennial movement and are symptomatic of the uses of history as a way to form a sense of national identity in Australia. The so-called history wars (see Macintyre and Clark) gained momentum in the years around the making of the Bicentenary and in many ways influenced the perception Australians had of themselves. Embodied primarily by the Australian National University’s (ANU) Manning Clark and the University of Melbourne’s Geoffrey Blainey, the opposing perspectives of history referred to as ‘black armband’ (a view based mostly on the violence and dispossession that followed the frontier encounters between Europeans and Aboriginal people) and ‘white blindfold’ (a view that ignores such violence, focussing on the European ingenuity and prowess in taming the harshness of the Australian outback) have permeated both academic and popular opinion as both historians were, at the time, public intellectuals. Since the Hawke Labor government had an intent to bring all Australians together as part of the Bicentenary, Clark, who called for a view of history that 100

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did not disregard frontier violence, was unofficially chosen as the representative of the version of Australian history Hawke wanted to commemorate. As both historians had opinion columns in national newspapers, a long-lasting debate between them ensued, which only further polarised public opinion. Such a debate around versions of Australian history was indeed very rich and led to the appearance of many (somewhat) questionable icons such as the reconstruction of the arrival of the First Fleet on Botany Bay on 26 January 1988, and Manning Clark’s History of Australia: The Musical (1988), written to coincide with the Bicentenary but negative reviews of which forced production to shut down after only about seven weeks. It can be argued, however, that the tensions around history – official and alternative versions – and the questionable ways the ABA dealt with it can be seen in the two official history books funded by the authority. John Molony’s The Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia (1987) generated intense controversy upon its launch, mainly due to the high expectation it generated because of the role it could potentially play amid the history wars. Molony, then-Professor of History at ANU, and a member of the advisory committee of the ABA for its history programme, was not a well-known or influential historian and his choice for such a task may have had political motivations. The project was ambitious: to create a historical narrative faithful to both European and Aboriginal versions of Australian history to 1988, and still maintaining, as much as possible, a celebratory tone. The result was disastrous: Molony’s was a history of white, Anglo-Australia, with very little attention given to Aboriginal presence throughout the centuries. This was made more problematic by the extremely short introduction (only four paragraphs!) to the volume. In it, he briefly explains that ‘[i]t was not my privilege to write their [Aboriginal] history, because I am not one of them. My people have taken enough from them … Reconciliation must be our first aspiration as we celebrate the Bicentenary’ (ix–x). Although his position was academically valid, since it shows an explicit standpoint from which his historiography is developed, the fact that it bore the official ABA seal and, as such, was the official version of history for that time, attracted strong criticism, particularly from Aboriginal scholars and activists. The second history volume funded by the ABA managed to do what Molony’s book did not do: published in 1988, The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, edited by Laurie Hergenhan and Bruce Bennett, presents a different standpoint to its historical and historiographic counterpart. Written as a reaction against The Oxford History of Australian Literature (1981), which still reflected a deeply colonial mindset, Hergenhan’s History states that the general guidelines to the volume were those which would take ‘the form of escape from an imposed, subordinate history’ (xi), openly positioning itself as a postcolonial history of Australian literature and, consequently, of Australia itself. Assuming an openly postcolonial standpoint has two major implications, especially for 1980s Australia. First, in regard to the theoretical perspective, which necessarily incorporates multiple (marginalised, subaltern) voices to defy the imposed, subordinate (colonial, imperial) versions of history; secondly, such a defiance of (in this case, the official version of ) history forced an understanding that history is nothing but interpretation of facts based on ideological points of view. The volume on literary history thus took a more pluralist, heteroglossic, multicultural view of the nation than the volume on Australian history, suggesting that literature allows us to better examine the social and historical tensions and shifts Australian culture was going through during the 1980s, many of which still remain unresolved. Indeed, the ABA also commissioned literary works – official Bicentennial fiction, as they marketed it – and approached five best-selling female writers who subsequently published four novels: Elizabeth Jolley’s The Sugar Mother (1988), Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History (1988), Robyn Davidson’s Ancestors (1989), and Joan Bedford’s A Lease of Summer (1990). A fifth novel should have been published, but Olga Masters died before she could finish it. It would be naïve, though, to assume that Hergenhan’s History was ground-breaking in its novel take on history. The volume was a timely and necessary response to the reconstructive and 101

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deconstructive shifts in historiography that had been taking place since the 1970s, distancing themselves from the colonial models of the time. Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia (1970), for instance, unveils racism and xenophobia as the pillars for the nationalist project of the nation; Anne Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975), and Miriam Dixson The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present (1976), questioned the colonial masculine perception of Australia’s history and identity by focussing on ‘Australian women, women in the land of mateship’ (Dixson 11). Richard White’s Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 (1981), Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (1987), and Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (1987) are examples of historiographic models which reinforce Hayden White’s historiographical model developed in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), where the notion of emplotment, defined as ‘the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind’ (7), is developed. Such a notion is not new to novelists, but applying it to the field of history forces historiography to reinvent itself. History thus becomes, if not literature, its close neighbour. Much of the literary production of the years around the existence of the ABA, as one could anticipate given the spread and scope of the tensions around history and historiography, incorporates ways of understanding national history and identity. Themes such as feminism(s) and the female presence, masculinity/manliness, Aboriginality, and immigration have gained space and centrality particularly for representative voices whose authority and experience could question colonial history. For instance, Drusilla Modjeska states that during that period, ‘[w]omen were producing the best fiction of the period and they were, for the first and indeed the only time, a dominant influence in Australian literature’ (1). The role women writers have had in the making of Australian literature helped pave the way to other forms of understanding women’s fiction in the country, such as Carole Ferrier’s Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth-Century Australian Women’s Novels (1985), in which the focus shifts to new readings of Australian novels written by women from socialist and/or feminist perspectives. Ferrier’s views brought together feminist standpoints, forms of literary and cultural critique associated with the New Left, and radical Marxism. Australian women’s historical fiction of that time can thus be seen to have made explicit women’s roles in building a sense of national identity. One interesting example of the impact such a reassessment had can be seen in Jean Bedford’s novel Sister Kate (1981), in which Bedford reexamines one of the most important foundational myths of Australian national identity, the feats of Ned Kelly and his group of criminals, from the point of view of his younger sister, Kate. Bedford’s novel predates Robert Drewe’s Our Sunshine (1991) by 10 years, and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) by 20 years, both of which also reevaluated the myth of Ned Kelly and achieved considerable success. The novel opens with 12-year-old Kate receiving her brother Ned back home, in 1874, after he had spent time in gaol for stealing horses. Kate soon realises that the established gender roles meant that she could never be part of her brother’s gang, despite being a better rider than many of them. However, Kate is shown as a witness to the history of her brother’s actions, including the siege at the Glenrowan Hotel, where Ned was ultimately killed. Bedford gives readers a woman whose story does not end with her brother’s death, giving justice to the real-life Kate Kelly, a woman who had to live under the aegis of her last name while trying to assert her independence in a world where women were imprisoned by the expectations of domesticity. Although she died before she could submit her ABA-commissioned novel, Masters’s Loving Daughters (1984) and Amy’s Children (published posthumously in 1987) can be seen alongside the work of Miles Franklin and Christina Stead for the way in which she explores gender roles in Australian society. In Loving Daughters, set in New South Wales after the end of the Great War, readers meet the Herbert family, and follow the lives of the two daughters, Enid, who embodies 102

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domesticity through a mastery of all chores women were expected to perform, and Una, whose orientation is more artistic, seen in her mastery of sewing skills. The two women must look after their father and brother, married to Evelyn, a city girl, whose death opens the book. The novel focusses on the tensions, presented via flashbacks, between Evelyn, who was unable to adapt to country life, and the two sisters, who are both in love with and both loved by the same man, Reverend Edwards. Loving Daughters ‘presents a community of inverted sex roles – women are ambitious figures of action, men are useless children’ (Lee-Jones 52), where masculine silence and feminine action can be seen as the direct result of Australia’s involvement in the Great War, a moment in history presented as the nation’s ‘coming of age’ and the site of the formation of the Australian ethos. In Amy’s Children, however, the focus shifts from the domesticity and inherent submission of women to established gender roles in rural life to a discussion of the expected naturalisation of motherhood as a pillar of femininity. Twenty-year-old Amy Fowler is abandoned by her husband, Ted, and left with their three daughters in country New South Wales during the height of the Great Depression. Feeling unable to fulfil her expected role as a mother, Amy leaves her children with their grandmother to find work in another town. As the years pass, the fact that Amy’s daughters do not see her as a mother is felt by her as an act of liberation which allows her to move to Sydney in search of better work and life. In doing so, Amy sees herself as running towards instead of running away from the life she is expected to have as both a country girl and a mother. Indeed, when her oldest daughter, Kathleen, moves to Sydney to live with her, Amy forbids her daughter to address her as ‘mother’ and sees in her a potential rival when both women are interested in the same man, Lance Yates, the owner of the factory where both women work. The tension between Amy and Kathleen escalates when the mother sees in the daughter a drive towards independence similar to her own. In the end, Amy is forced to move back to Digger’s Creek with her newborn son, the result of Amy’s and Lance’s affair. Masters’s project in both novels is then to question, through irony, the discursive elements of female liberation of the 1970s and 1980s. Arguably, no novel has had such a powerful impact in revisiting Australian history in the 1980s than Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History (1988), an interesting response to the erasure of women from official versions of Australian history. Grenville’s novel openly embraces the herstory project: a wordplay that, at the same time, addresses the uses of history (‘his story’) for the maintenance of patriarchy and disrupts it by allowing the discussion of gender in the understanding of making the nation. In the novel, the protagonist and narrator, Joan, imagines herself as a participant in many events, meaningful or otherwise, of Australian history – as Captain Cook’s wife, as a convict in the First Fleet, as an Aboriginal woman, as a washerwoman for a family of free settlers during the Gold Rush of the 1840s. Joan, the daughter of eastern European immigrants, presents herself as an ‘Australian Everywoman’ and Grenville is not particularly interested in creating a solid, self-sustainable example of herstory in Joan Makes History; instead, she tests the boundaries of historiography as the basis of history, and ‘to see what a price women pay for holding on to the male dream of making history which, as feminist historians have pointed out, means glorifying individualism and the stories of the male elites’ (Goulston 26). Of course, these male elites at the centre of the historical process are also white, and since race relations have always been an element of tension in the making of Australia, it is only natural that the revisiting of history through literature should also be extended to an understanding of Aboriginality. In the field of history, this trend can be identified first in Henry Reynolds’s The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), ‘a white man’s interpretation, aimed primarily at white Australians’ (1) where the historian questions the then-widespread thesis that the Aboriginal response to European settlement (or invasion) was passive, reinstating historical agency to Aboriginal people. Published in that same year, another book with the same goals but dealing with a different epistemology is Lyndall Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians. Unlike Reynolds, Ryan includes oral testimonies by 103

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descendants of Aboriginal Tasmanians, validating oral sources in the (re)construction of a new form of historiography. Two novels stand out in this process of shifting historical perspectives from a white centre to a black periphery. The first is Mudrooroo’s Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983), first published under the name Colin Johnson. Like the earlier The Savage Crows (1976), by Robert Drewe, Mudrooroo’s novel also deals with the question of the Tasmanian genocide. Unlike Drewe’s novel, where the protagonist is a white journalist who comes across a fictional account of the real expeditions led by George Augustus Robinson in Van Diemen’s Land between 1829 and 1834, Mudrooroo gives voice to Wooreddy, the husband of Truganini, who is acknowledged as the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal person. The protagonist is presented as a prophet, who foresees the end of the(ir) world as he witnesses, as a child, the European arrival on Bruny Island. Mudrooroo constructs Wooreddy as a doctor in the academic sense of the word: as someone whose keen observation of the world allows him to make educated assumptions about the changes that surround him. In this sense, readers are confronted with an ironic inversion of the expected (colonial) construction of race relations and tensions between Europeans and Aboriginal people, with the former being presented as uncivilised and the latter as well-educated, civilised members of a rich and complex culture. Despite the later controversy regarding Mudrooroo’s Aboriginal identity, Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription was the first novel to deal with Aboriginal history from a non-European epistemological perspective.1 Regardless of the questioning of Mudrooroo’s identity, he helped pave the way for a new generation of Australian Aboriginal writers to write their own history from a new, unique, and meaningful perspective. This includes Eric Willmot’s Pemulwuy: The Rainbow Warrior (1987), which retraces the history of the Eora people, who lived in and around Sydney Harbour at the time of the arrival of the British (whom the novel very openly calls invaders) in 1788. The novel reconstructs the history of Australian Aboriginal resistance against the British taking of their lands through the history of Pemulwuy, one of the many Aboriginal leaders who fought against such an invasion, and who is presented as the first Australian patriot, a title that questions the very definition of the Australian nation. These novels also mark the beginning of new literary trends and forms led by Australian Aboriginal writers around the time of the Bicentennial, such as the Aboriginal memoir as a unique form of sociohistorical narrative, validating as history the voices and life narratives of recent entrants to social recognition. Such works include Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) and Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988), the latter funded by the ABA. The narratives present different, somewhat polarising experiences of the meaning of being Aboriginal in twentieth-century suburbia: whereas Morgan’s is a story of the discovery of her Aboriginal roots after a lifetime of thinking she was Indian, Langford’s is a story of displacement and what it means to be a nomad in a country that does not accept Aboriginal existence as such. A divergent voice emerges in Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung (1990), a novel that, while not historical in the traditional sense, provides an alternative solution to the problem of the representation of Indigeneity (in its apparent unintelligibility to European minds) in contemporary Australia. Set in Brisbane, in an alternative temporal-historical continuum, The Kadaitcha Sung tells the story of Tommy Gubba, the child of a white woman and Koobara, a Kadaitcha – an Aboriginal sorcerer – who is given the mission of killing his uncle, the evil Kadaitcha Booka, after he turns 21. Tommy is helped by a number of ancient spirits and must accomplish his task before the passage of Halley’s comet – or ‘the Eye of Biamee’ – which helps set the narrative in 1986. The novel suggests that the Kadaitcha were responsible for hiding the South Land from the rest of the world using magic and that only after Booka betrayed his brethren and lifted the magic veil was it possible for the Europeans to see (and take over) the land. Although the novel can thus be read as an Australian use of magic realism, a literary technique frequently used in 1950s and 1960s Latin American fiction as a way to create a mode of autonomous representation independent from 104

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European forms and aiming at what José Miguel Oviedo calls ‘the renewal of Indigeneity’ (67), to do so may mean to ignore the attempt to create an inherently Aboriginal form of representing the colonial presence in modern Australia. In fact, The Kadaitcha Sung is not a novel that happily and peacefully promotes a discourse of assimilation and integration. Instead, it explicitly marks the violence that permeates white-Aboriginal relations to this day. The representation of female and Aboriginal identities in history and fiction led to the questioning of the stereotypical form of Australian masculinity. The ensuing masculinity crisis in 1980s Australia is described in Dennis Altman’s seminal article ‘The Myth of Mateship’ (1987), in which he reevaluates the resurgence of ideas of mateship connected to ‘the development of an aggressively ocker nationalism’ (163). Altman’s article is perhaps best known for its reading of the Wardian bond between men as a middle-class creation and not something developed among convicts, as well as its suggestion that this bond that was not necessarily heterosexual. This ‘new Australian bloke’ challenges the national identity at the historical centre of Australia, and the perspective through which its history was told. Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair (1979) for arguably the first time in Australian literature moves issues such as homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and transvestism from the periphery to the centre of the narrative. The novel follows E, a character who assumes different identities throughout different moments of Australian and European history: in France during the Great War as Eudoxia Vatatzes, the mistress of a Greek man; in the Australian outback in the 1920s as Eddie Twyborn, a war hero turned jackaroo; and in London during the Second World War as Eadith Trist, a brothel owner. In each section of the novel, the protagonist attempts to find his true self by crossing and transiting the fluid boundaries of sex and gender identities, but White also uses E to question the colonial perception of Australian identity – as primarily British – from a European point of view and to question the sexual undertones of the discourse of Australian mateship. One of the most important modern myths of the construction of Australian identity is the conceptualisation of the Anzac soldiers in the First World War, often seen, as Clark points out, as symbols of the nation’s coming of age, and a rite of passage into modernity and nationhood. This narrative is depicted in David Malouf ’s Fly Away Peter (1983), which follows the lives of two men, Jim Saddler and Ashley Crowther, in the years previous to and during the war. While Ashley represents the upper-class man, returning from England to his family’s Gold Coast property after his years of education, Jim represents a form of Australian masculine identity that is more connected to the land (rather than to the British culture), as he spends his days birdwatching. A bond of mateship is instantly formed between the two, based upon the quintessentially Australian principle of egalitarianism, so that despite the evident class distinction that separates them, Jim and Ashley bond as brothers. When news of the war reaches Brisbane, Jim is compelled to enlist in order to be a part of history. The second part of the novel takes place in the Dardanelles, depicting the violence and atrocities of the war seen through the eyes of a young man attracted by the beauty of nature. The myth of war bravery is confronted by the reality of bombs exploding limbs and the creation of empty, traumatised men. No analysis of the impact of the crisis of masculinity in 1980s Australian historical fiction would be complete without mentioning two meaningful novels by Peter Carey: Illywhacker (1985) and Oscar and Lucinda (1988). In Illywhacker, readers follow the life of Herbert Badgery, who opens the narrative by stating that he is 139 years old and that he has always been a liar. Hebert exposes a panorama of twentieth-century Australian history, from the tensions of Modernity – materialised by his obsession with the automobile and the aeroplane – to Australia’s (historical and current) relationship to Asia. It is an example of the postmodernity of Australian fiction of the 1980s, with particular reference to Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction. By simultaneously presenting the narrator as a liar and limiting our perspective of Australian history to his own, Illywhacker debunks many of the pillars on top of which Australian domestic mythologies had been forged. In Oscar and Lucinda, Carey plays with the contrast between British 105

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and colonial Australian identities through the widespread idea that the harshness of the Outback would create more ‘manly’ men than the green fields and pastures of England. Set in the 1860s, the novel tells the story of the relationship between Oscar Hopkins, a physically and psychologically weak British-born Anglican minister with a gambling addiction, and Lucinda Lepastrier, a Sydney-born heiress to a small fortune, who meet on a poker table aboard the ship on the way to New South Wales. The pair bond over a wager: Lucinda, who owns a glass factory, constructs a glass church for the young Reverend Hopkins to take to Boat Harbour, but due to Oscar’s acute hydrophobia, the building has to be transported by land, through yet uncharted territory. The expedition meets and slaughters a friendly Aboriginal tribe, much to Oscar’s dismay. Through him, the reader experiences the horror of frontier encounters, questioning the myth of peaceful and mutually agreed upon colonial processes of opening the territory. The issues raised in these novels, enhanced by the debates around which nation to celebrate during the making of the Australian Bicentenary, did not fade out with the end of the festivities (see Marks de Marques 279–87). In fact, it can be said that much of the history wars of the 1990s and early 2000s have found their trigger point in elements made (more) publicly visible by the Bicentenary. During the 1980s, historical versions of the nation centred on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality both fed and were fed by their literary responses, approximating both forms of discourse under the tenets of postmodernism and its concept of historiographical metafiction as never before in Australia. The tensions between historical versions of national identity – and, consequently, their literary responses – are still evident in the country. Perhaps making such tensions more evident has been the best Bicentennial legacy after all.

Note

Works Cited Altman, Dennis. ‘The Myth of Mateship.’ Meanjin 46.2 (1987): 163–172. Dixson, Miriam. The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1976. Goulston, Wendy. ‘Herstory’s Re/Visions of History.’ Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 7 (1992): 20–27. Hergenhan, Laurie, gen. ed. The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1988. Lee-Jones, Nancy. ‘Rev. Olga Masters’s Loving Daughters.’ Antipodes 1.1 (1987): 52. Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clark. The History Wars. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2003. Marks de Marques, Eduardo. Around 1988: History and/as Fiction and the Australian Bicentenary. Unpublished PhD diss. U of Queensland, 2007. Modjeska, Drusilla. Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers. Sydney, NSW: Sirius, 1981. Molony, John. The Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia: The Story of 200 Years. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1987. Oviedo, Jose Miguel. Historia de la Literatura Hispanoamericana. Madrid: Alianza, 1995. Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. 2nd ed. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1995. Shaw, George. ‘Bicentennial Writing: Revealing the Ash in the Australian Soul.’ 1988 and All That: New Views on Australia’s Past. Ed. George Shaw. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988. 1–2. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972.

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11 POLITICS AND CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN FICTION Nicholas Birns

Politics in the Nation This chapter will consider explicit references to Australian politics in contemporary Australian writing, assessing both their referential import and the way in which their articulation speaks to particularly Australian circumstances.1 Australian writing has seldom considered politics of its own time. This is especially true in the past 40 years, when the Labor-centered and Marxist ambience that produced works such as Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory (1957) has waned. In poetry, the active topical commentary of the nineteenth century faded as Australian poets assumed the lyrical stance of successive waves of twentieth-century international modernisms. Indeed, recent decades have seen the odd paradox of Australia being, in a news sense, most visible on the world scene when there is a change in government or Prime Minister – and as disconcerting as the kaleidoscope of Prime Ministers in the 2010s may have been to Australians, every change in leader made for considerable visibility abroad. Yet Australian politics as a literary subject was almost entirely unrepresented in the world republic of letters. Indeed, Australian history, which could also be described simply as Australian politics of a relatively distant past, is far more popular in books that resonated globally than any reference to recent Australian politics. Part of the reason for this might be that colonial Australian history is tied up with Great Britain and is recognisable to readers used to paradigms of British fiction. Yet, contemporary Australian politics are not only conditional upon Australia’s national self-determination but feature a political system with a different electoral schedule than Britain’s, different voting laws, a very different judiciary system, as well as prominent roles for the Senate and each state and territory, which have no true British analogue. However, this neglect could more simply stem from a sense that Australian politics is not interesting, since Australian writers have written liberally, as we shall see, about other countries’ politics. The generalities about Australian visibility in the global sphere – that Australia is a largely Western country without the power of other Western countries – come across demonstrably here. A powerful country’s politics are interesting because they can affect other countries, whereas a powerless country’s politics are interesting because they render the country vulnerable to being affected by other countries. A peripheral, middle power sees no action other way – other than in a time of crisis. One of the unsettling effects of the bushfire crisis of December 2019 was that, for the first time in living memory, many people in the Global North became familiar with an Australian Prime Minister’s name for the first time. Yet there has, in the 2010s, been a greater prominence in Australian novels of fictional characters who are Prime Ministers. In Peter Rose’s Roddy Parr (2010), Philip Anthem is a 107

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former Prime Minister who is the brother of David Anthem, the novel’s writer-protagonist. In Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Warren Finch is Australia’s first Indigenous Prime Minister, and is seen as betraying his people and becoming a tool of the white establishment. In Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light (2014), the Indigenous woman Tanya Sparkle becomes President of a future Australian republic and makes the country a hodgepodge of Indigenous self-assertion and self-aggrandising governance that in reality brings the Indigenous cause no further forward. In Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), the ten young women who are punished for having affairs with powerful men include Verla, who has been taken advantage of by a prominent politician. In Gail Jones’s Five Bells (2011), Kevin Rudd is referred to, though not by name: ‘the youngish Prime Minister, his moon face beaming, looked pleased with himself, like a school prefect dressed in his blazer, receiving a prize’ (21). Jones’s allusion to Rudd makes tacit reference to Virginia Woolf ’s mention of an (unnamed) British Prime Minister in Mrs Dalloway (1925); for Woolf, the precise identity of the politician mattered little; for Jones, a similarly stylistically minded writer of comparable poise and curiosity, it clearly does. Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats (2017) begins its reflection on migrations, refugees, and the paradox of people once migrants themselves but who refuse to accept new migrants, by conjuring the disappearance at sea of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt. The man who memorably said that Australia would be ‘all the way with LBJ’ in Vietnam is unwillingly swept into the same ocean that so many others will later try to cross in order to reach an Australia that does not always want them. Castagna’s narrator provocatively speculates that he is ‘eaten by a shark because he relaxed the White Australia policy’ (136). While Holt was no multiculturalist, the novel thus positions Australia’s whiteness at the core of its fragile national ego; this helps explain why the Tampa crisis is at least an occasion for Castagna’s major character, Antonio Martone, to break down psychologically to the point where he commits an action (shooting a plastic gun at a ship’s captain) that is outside all social norms. While focussing on the psychic and domestic discord in the life of Martone, a refugee from Italy in the 1960s who opposes the admission of refugees during the Tampa crisis of 2001, Castagna mentions John Howard prominently and, in perhaps the most grimly funny episode in the book, has then-Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock make a cameo appearance in Parramatta urging ‘balance in migration’ (91). Castagna’s willingness to mix fictional and real characters and, even more significantly, to write into the middle of the Australian representational field and to chronicle a climactic turning-point in Australian history, augur a new willingness in Australian fiction to be topical and strongly Australian in a way that also gestures to the global significance of such events. Australian poets also mentioned specific Prime Ministers in the 2010s. For instance, Stuart Cooke’s flarfing of Tony Abbott in ‘(Tony Abbott is a) Flarf Fugue’ (2016) and Toby Fitch’s reference to ‘Turnbull rhetoric’ in ‘27 Materialisations of Sydney Cloud’ (2017). Cooke’s poem also features an anticipatory, as it were, slap at Scott Morrison (line 3). In turn, Abbott and the Liberal Prime Ministers that followed him in the 2010s have generally been hostile to the cultural sphere. They did continue to participate in cultural institutions, such as the Prime Minister’s Literary Award established by Rudd, and in September 2018 Morrison allowed himself to be photographed with a display of mainly literary books, including one by the Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le, who has critiqued just the sort of exclusionary policy towards migrants Morrison has espoused. In December of that year he also boasted of being the great-nephew of the poet Dame Mary Gilmore, a woman of very different political views. The Right also endorsed the attempts of the Ramsey Centre to set up ‘Great Books’ courses at various Australian universities, reflecting the late twentieth-century Right’s attempts to act as defenders of Western civilisation. But, in general, the Right saw the cultural sphere as an enemy, and the cultural sphere returned those sentiments. 108

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A Politics Despite the Nation In ‘We’ (2012), Ali Alizadeh illustrates both the political atmosphere of the 2010s and the literary world’s almost inherent scepticism of its consequences: We are decent. We love our country and our liberty. We earn a living off the profits of thingifying nature for rich trading partners who pay us with the blood of terrorised workers. We hear the chitchat between the puppets of capital (Prime Minister & Opp. Leader) and give our consent to their triviality via free and fair elections. (lines 1–8)

Most Australian poets might, however, disagree with the implication that it does not matter what political party is in power. But the political valence of Australian poetry in the 2010s was, in general, less direct and more ramified. Contemporary Australian poets are aware of their world as a place of cruelty despite progress in technology, communication, and cultural pluralism that would have made their Modernist predecessors more optimistic than they in fact were. As Sarah Holland-Batt puts it, I will not presume to say what suffering is or how it was meted out in this place. At what point it breaks a body I cannot tell. (lines 15–18)

Michelle Cahill sees this onslaught of self-cancelling information as a mechanism for the deliberate ignorance, by people inhabiting white privilege, of the Asian and Other: Days before there was a plane crash in Jogjakarta. Award winning journalists were burnt alive like fuel for media barons and technophiles. It’s strange how we crave the visual, buying and selling images of tsunamis, flash flooding, avian flu epidemics. (lines 11–16)

These poets do not just despair, but when they provide solutions they recognise that they will be both indirect and costly. Bonny Cassidy calls for environmental action while recognising that the necessary insistence of truth has both a limitation and a discursive cost with criminal simplicity with historical truth we can detoxify a poisoned planet. (lines 9–11)

The key phrase here is ‘criminal simplicity’ which, unlike ‘historical truth,’ we cannot champion unequivocally. And yet the second phrase can help unpack the first, because certainly the literary world has wanted – and with good reason – to question historical truth over the past century. The recourse to historical truth is thus a form of strategic essentialism, and so must be criminal simplicity – but a strategic essentialism that is not just anodyne, that cuts like a knife and requires some expenditure, of integrity, of complexity. At one point, perhaps, it seemed as if linguistic self-consciousness could distinguish the sheep from the goats in cultural-political terms. But the Right caught up with linguistic self-consciousness some time ago. Kinsella’s protest poem against Pauline Hanson, ‘Graphology Spectre 20: Agonist Voting Patterns’ (2018), shows contemporary racism downgrading language in a way like that which Viktor Klemperer had discerned in the ‘LTI’ – lingua tertii imperium – of the Third Reich: ‘Vote’ is now a portmanteau word for a conservative with a whitewashed

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Nicholas Birns wheelbarrow gestating syllables of emphasis and ‘er yuck’-edness. (lines 19–23)

Language itself may be double-edged, but it matters who controls which edge. Alison Whittaker seems to be rebuking academic jargon in favour of felt life, but it could be that she is saying academic jargon is pertinent – note that the final lines feature the abstract, Latin word ‘ruminate’ precisely because it reflects the resistance that can happen in our bones and our moods: And then, at every drawn goodbye like a choir, leaning each to the other to hold a clap my nan clasps my hands and whispers to me decolonising epistemology, and critical autonomy, and affective phenomenology. And what she says is: remember yourself, and call me once a week on which I ruminate O, Eureka! (lines 26–34)

That ‘O, Eureka’ is, elsewhere in the poem, transmogrified as ‘O, the weaker’ (line 250), signifies the interplay of ‘white theory words’ (line 19) and lived vulnerabilities of experience in ways that privilege both, mock neither, and call attention to all. That ‘Eureka’ not only connotes discovery but, in Australian terms, resistance (even if largely white resistance against the oppressor) means that there is a complicated verbal play here which is not just leaving jargon to the enemy. That the nan’s advice is once both philosophical and practical, empowering on a primal, personal level but also deeply interrogatory of structures of oppression, builds a paradoxical but not inappropriate intellectual superstructure onto words of succour and consolation. It is in this sense the opposite of Cassidy’s ‘criminal simplicity’; a strategic academicism, as it were, may sometimes be the way to protect what matters. It is notable that in the 2010s Australian poets and novelists seem to be on the same page, writing about the same issues, whereas in the 2000s they were more focussed on seeking international acceptance – the poets from the networked world of largely American semi-official experimentalists, and the novelists from the international conglomerates of Anglophone publishing. In both cases, a reason for this self-internationalising might have been a sense that the Australian nation, paradoxically, was too constricted a space to be political. With an Australian literary sphere confident that it can be global, national, and literary at once, the genres can now, in their different ways, see the same things. Thus, Australian poetry now has a politics, in some ways, despite the nation.

A Politics of the Nation How, in Australian political terms, might we classify such Australian novels as Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2003), about Communist East Germany, Sara Dowse’s As the Lonely Fly (2017), about mandate-era Palestine, or Alice Nelson’s The Children’s House (2017), set in New York City’s Harlem as well as on an Israeli kibbutz? Indeed, these novels show Australian writers as adept at sketching a politics of the nation, even if it is not Australia. The Israel/Australia connection that both Dowse and Nelson tacitly make calls attention not just to the presence of a settler/occupier culture at the core of both national models but to the way in which a national community defined by idealism and inclusion can easily become one defined by fear and exclusion. Some novels, such as Stephanie Bishop’s The Other Side of the World (2015), juxtapose Australian national questions with those pertaining to areas at once comparable and different, as in India, in order to name and acknowledge the explicitly Australian element in the transnational, that it is politically blinkered 110

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to imagine they are distinct or extricable from each other. When Dowse has her character Chava write, of the land in Palestine, that the ‘land is terribly bumpy … and stumbling towards the interior I felt like some struggling ant making my way over a bolt of corduroy’ (34), we note that this could with little adaptation be written by someone going into the Australian interior during or after the era of exploration, similarly seeking a ‘brave, implacable’ tradition that would ‘create a new nation’ (172), and in both cases without the consent of the people who had already lived there. Similarly, Nelson has Marina, a Jewish-American woman raised on a kibbutz in Israel and married to an older man of similar background, take an adoptive interest in Gabriel, the child of a refugee from the Rwandan genocide, and feel a ‘small thrill’ (194) as Gabriel begins to prefer Marina to his own mother, Constance. Here there is a sense of usurpation or appropriation by the white of the non-white, paralleled by references to the ‘Nanset tribes who first inhabited the dunes’ (288) of Cape Cod, as well as the Aleuts of Alaska. Though the novel’s only overtly Antipodean reference is to an ‘Australian essayist’ (206) Marina encounters in France, the novel’s themes of displacement and usurpation – present subtly even in the displacement of a convent of nuns from New York City to upstate New York – are of Australia even if not in Australia. Ceridwen Dovey’s novel Blood Kin (2008) is set in a nameless country – modern and, it seems, English-speaking – during a coup where a President is replaced by his former chief general. This coup, reminiscent of Chile or Pakistan, is seen not from the standpoint of political and military actors, as in the Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif ’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), but through the voices of the old President’s chef, barber, and portraitist, and then, in the second section, from the point of view of three women linked to these men. The portraitist, in particular, muses upon the relation of aesthetics and politics: I have never paid attention to politics; if I am exempt, from one thing as an artist, surely it is knowing what the government was doing. Much more liberating to me than the puny stirrings of student revolutionaries was how to transform a thought into an image. (14) The portraitist goes on to say that he and his wife made a point to never listen to the news – despite holding a position adjacent to power, fi not necessarily close to it, as the President’s court painter. That adjacency matters, as is shown in the case of the barber, who seeks a position with the President just so he can occasionally have power over the man who had cruelly killed his brother. Dovey, who grew up in the milieu of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, reenacts the primal predicament of the artist: that art is often circumstantially dependent on power, but must be imaginatively autonomous of it. She adds a further irony, that often the artist must delude themselves into thinking this adjacency is not pertinent. While showing the complicity of the artist, Dovey does not entirely undercut the portraitist’s desire for artistic autonomy, demonstrating how precarious and gossamer this independence is, even at its most genuine. Dovey’s transnational setting is, at the same time, not non-Australian. Despite the Kaf kaesque abstraction of her setting, it is inescapably national, made so by the positions of President and Commander but also the adjacency of the portraitist, barber, and chef, such that the chef ’s daughter can ask, of the presidential palace, ‘[w]ho is living here now? I haven’t followed the papers. I don’t even know who organised the coup’ (154). The place is abstract, but the space is particular. Transnationalism has often been implicitly seen as the opposite of the Australian. But in the 2010s, the transnational can be seen as Australia’s mirror. Dovey, Nelson, and Dowse, although not writing about politics in the (Australian) nation, are nonetheless evoking a politics of the nation, including the ways nations can constrain and fasten identities and also how they can try, and fail, to make immanent the idea of utopian space. Dowse’s Chava says that, in mandate-era Palestine, she and her friends ‘speak of little else but the brand new socialist future ahead of us but at this point it’s hardly more than an abstraction’ (35). In Nelson’s novel, Dov, Marina’s brother, kills himself 111

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because he feels being collectively raised in a kibbutz has destroyed his life. The failure of even a benign collectivist dream is thus seen, albeit in a far different key than the Rwandan genocide, as one of the devastations of the twentieth century. That the collectivist dream of the kibbutz is also premised on land-attachment and settlement has articulately Australian implications. Even as late as the 2010s, many Australian writers on the Left were still processing the failure of the Soviet Union and other twentieth-century socialisms. As early as the later fiction of Christina Stead, transnational space served as an arena for the disappointments of a particularly Australian left-wing intelligentsia. Literature’s ability to register trauma, as in the case of the European colonisation of Australian itself, gives ethical dilemmas such as that posed by Nelson – does a white woman have a right to raise an African woman’s child – a more than tacit politics.

A Politics around the Nation The Australian literary sphere in the 2010s was highly localised, with national and state literary festivals, print and online books coverage, and the book industry itself, with the rise of a new wave of independent, Australia-based publishers, all based within Australia. Yet Australian literature was also significantly globalised, with many prominent writers living abroad, and with Australian writers receiving more recognition in international prizes and literary coverage, as seen in the Windham Campbell Literary Award sponsored by Yale University, which in its first years of existence honoured several Australian writers. The global dimension of Australian literature, though, operated not just as cosmopolitan outreach but also a space to air out literary engagements that the small size and intimacy of the Australian publishing world threatened to make parochial and coloured by the force and charisma of individual publishing personalities. Thus, the politics of contemporary Australian literature is also an attempt to avoid the constraint of remaining within the electoral and cultural politics of a strictly defined Australian national space. A politics around the nation uses the national space as a springboard to discuss issues not fully national, although never entirely divorced from the idea of nation. Wood’s novel, The Natural Way of Things, depicts a private security company that captures women; it is a capitalist enterprise whose procedures are redolent of post-Fordist mass privatisation, yet is also acting as an agent or deputy for a nationally mandated discipline. The two women who appear to escape at the book’s end, Yolanda and Verla, take different paths, one taking the case within societal networks, the other voyaging into the animal world, as if to make the point these forces have to be opposed both biologically and societally, or through both the human and the nonhuman. The 2010s saw a flourishing of female, migrant, and Indigenous writers, many of whom wrote novels that, far from iterating specific and demarcated identity claims, wrote into the middle of Australian discursive space. This is particularly true of Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013), which paints a detailed portrait of a specific Australian community on the eve of confronting its own history of Indigenous dispossession, and her next novel, Too Much Lip (2018). In Too Much Lip, in response to the assertion of her mother, Pretty Mary, that white people are not really racist, they just have no culture, Kerry Salter says, ‘everybody on the planet’s got a culture’ (115). Although Kerry notes with asperity that her mother is willing to be gracious to whites in a way that she is not to her own daughter, she nonetheless also makes a statement here about inclusiveness: in this case it is Indigenous people granting cultural power that was formerly undertaken by whites. But the 2010s also saw a resurgence of white male claims to identity, and in particular, young white Australian men proclaiming their own subaltern identity, often coming out of a sense of a distinct class or geographical origin. For instance, Shannon Burns speaks of coming from a ‘north-western suburb of Adelaide that was, for decades, predominantly white and working class’ (36), or as in Luke Carman’s case, hailing from Western Sydney as a ‘bookish boy’ who ‘has no tribe’ in the midst of Australia’s most multicultural space (Watts). In many ways, these writers are of the Left and thus see their own claims as with the identity-claims of women and minority 112

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communities. But there is also a sense in which, by critiquing a dominant left-wing establishment, these writers are participating in what A.D. Hope had seen as the function of the Australian author: to scourge the ‘chattering apes’ feigning at civilisation, to lambaste the complacent clerisy with prophetic vigour (13). Burns’s piece, for instance was republished by the US website ­RealClearPolicy, which stresses its openness to all strands of opinion but in practice gives slightly more weight to those right of centre. The content of white working-class self-awareness might not always be right-wing, but the tropology can be. Ben Etherington’s fierce attack on Peter Craven in the Sydney Review of Books’ Critic Watch in October 2017 represented a critique by a fresh young voice on an icon of mainstream Australian literary criticism. Some of Etherington’s critique of Craven, such as pointing out that he has written practically nothing on Aboriginal writers, is both pertinent and politically progressive. On the other hand, Craven, even when typically writing for newspapers assuming a right-of-centre editorial position, did take generally left-of-centre views on major global issues. The positionality of contemporary politics is complex, and old definitions of left and right rooted in the twentieth century are beginning not to suit. Carman is self-aware of the potential for his critique to be seen as ‘reactionary drivel’ (15) and that the reactionary is not entirely excluded by its discursive self-articulation. That, as in Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, the government can always imprison women for the crime of their own sexuality, or that as in Castagna’s No More Boats, some immigrants can be authorised, some banned, speaks to the danger of assuming that qualified and progressive voices like Craven’s can be conveniently jettisoned once they have become generationally stale. Such posture could be too much like the spectre of a Morrison, or even a Peter Dutton, ‘replacing’ Keating-era social policies. In addition, the entire idea of settler Australia, presenting a haven for the white male beyond the Global South, placed on Australian literary discourse a burden of not seeming to exalt Australian space, as it had been for both Captain Cook and the first convicts, as a sanctuary for white manhood at the furthest extreme of the world. And yet the critiques of Carman, Burns, and Etherington are not without a point. The Australian critical establishment could be complacent precisely in its liberalism. In the 2010s, it became increasingly clear that a major segment of Australian society, bolstered by an aggressive press and media sector, still vehemently wished to hold on to white privilege, hinder LGBT rights, and resist multiculturalism and the acknowledgment of the Indigenous presence on the land. This led the literary sphere, even where varied in gender, generation, and mode, to be monolithically left-wing in ways that could lead to a sense of attitudes that were for display rather than as incitements to action. This was a critique Stead had made of the Left throughout her (adamantly left-wing) career, and that Elizabeth Harrower did as well in her final novel, In Certain Circles (2014). Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come (2017), the winner of the 2018 Miles Franklin Award, satirises, in the character of Pippa, just this sort of rudderless progressivism. Pippa (she is born ‘Narelle,’ but changes her name to move up in social status) mouths all the right opinions even while fetishising her Sri Lankan lover, Ash, and exploiting an older Sri Lankan woman, Christabel, for the purpose of getting literary mileage out of her as a minor fictional character. Even Ash is not beyond criticism here, as he represents a privileged ruling class within Sri Lanka. de Kretser, in an idea that comes ultimately from the British historian Hugh Thomas, speaks of ‘national socialism’ (54) as being the dominant political ideology of postcolonial countries. The novel makes clear that any crisis in Australian political identity cannot be saved by looking to other politics in the Global South as healing or contrastive exemplars. But the book is not simply a critique of white liberalism in favour of a more multiracial and intersectional justice. The attitude towards Pippa is perspectival and at many points critical, but never crudely judgemental. The reader in a sense knows they ‘are’ Pippa enough not to simply abject her. Yet Pippa represents a default leftism in the Australian republic of letters that reflects the way very few writers identify as being of the political Right. Nor do many Australian writers represent 113

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overtly right-wing politicians or even people with right-wing political views. Castagna’s Antonio is used by the Right but is not depicted as someone totally in control of his own cognition or behaviour. He is maddened by his own sense of futility, and his dissatisfaction with how his own life, and his children, and his relationship with them, have turned out such that he acts in ways that are not only reactionary but antisocial. Castagna’s novel is one of the few to actually depict an individual identifying with the political Right, but in this sense Antonio does so in ways that are both performative and that mark him as of the fringe. The association of, at least, racism with disappointment is also seen in Melanie Cheng’s short story ‘Australia Day’ (2017), where Stanley, an Australian of Hong Kong- Chinese origin, visits the family of the woman he would like to be his girlfriend, only to have her father, Neville Cook – a reference to Captain James Cook – make stereotypical comments about Asians. His daughter apologises, but also links his conduct to disappointment: she notes that even his boyhood football team, South Melbourne, are now the Sydney Swans, strengthening a sense that the exclusionary politics of both Castagna’s Antonio and Cheng’s Neville have to do with a sense of alienation from the twenty-first century itself. The question of gender is salient here as well. With the white male displaced from a default assumption of being tantamount to Australia – for instance, Frank Hardy’s politics were radical, but they were radical mainly as compared to the politics of other white males – is the white male simply to claim one identity among disparate others, or serve as a tool for reaction and malice? Wood depicts the displacement of the working-class white male into criminal collaboration with privatised power, as well as toxic, racist masculinity in the public sphere. De Kretser alludes to the D.H. Lawrence of Kangaroo (1923) by mentioning Thirroul, where Lawrence wrote part of his Australia-set novel, but does not represent the libidinal, right-wing populism Lawrence depicted there, or its collateral descendant in the Abbott-Morrison tendencies in the contemporary Liberal party. The question remains open, with respect to de Kretser’s Pippa, whether hypocrisy and bad faith is intended to be as malevolent as an overtly conservative writer, or whether a Pippa-position is a necessary prerequisite to the possibility of genuine justice. As with Castagna, de Kretser writes into the middle of Australian national life. This is neither a necessary nor inevitable strategy in writing a political novel. Both Sofie Laguna, in The Choke (2017), which takes the reader into a traumatic childhood decades ago along the banks of the Murray, and Dovey’s The Garden of the Fugitives (2018), concerning transnational personal relationships among intellectuals, are highly political, while finding other courses than the middle one pursued by de Kretser. Yet, by naming what is at stake in the contemporary, books like de Kretser’s can help situate and illuminate those other visions. The vertebral backbone of de Kretser’s novel is Christabel, a Sri Lankan-born woman who appears in every section of the book. It is as if The Life to Come, in narrative terms, is performing its own act of restorative justice, making a figure caricatured as ‘on the margin of lives that matter’ (325) in Pippa’s novel into a subtle indispensability in de Kretser’s. After being exploited and her experience usurped by Pippa, who is predatory as person and artist, Christabel rebels and insists on her own identity, refuting representations of her that not only caricature her but reduce her deep emotional relationship with her friend Bunty into something that can be named and condescended to as sexual. As Ashleigh Synnott puts it, ‘[f ]iction writers, no matter how good our intentions, are not absolved of responsibility when it comes to representation. Every time we depict a person or group, we run the risk of dehumanising them.’ We are back to Dovey’s portraitist in Blood Kin, or perhaps more so the portraitist’s wife, a food stylist, who speaks of her work as ‘a perversion of aestheticism, making something seem what it is not’ (108). De Kretser wishes to celebrate the positive aspects of aesthetic power as much as Dovey does, but both writers recognise that representative sleight of hand can take licence with reality in ways that are politically toxic. De Kretser leaves us with a tableau of a successful, progressive woman who does not deserve or morally earn her success, just as Castagna makes us feel that Antonio has not totally merited his failure and abjection. 114

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Ultimately, self-possession and integrity seem to rule each other out. Christabel, though, stands up against Pippa’s usurpation of her and thus claims her own space in de Kretser’s narrative. This recognition that a political statement can occur not just in narrative but as narrative is perhaps the most effective way that Australian literature of the twenty-first century can manifest a politics in, of, around, and despite the nation. Contemporary writing about Australian politics expresses political convictions in ways both subtle and urgent as the occasions warrant. But it also articulates the political in ways that speak to specifically Australian contexts of address, purport, and audience, and has the potential to bridge the gap between the political and the literary.

Note

Works Cited Alizadeh, Ali. ‘We.’ Meanjin 71.1 (2012): 85. Burns, Shannon. ‘In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class.’ Meanjin Winter (2017): 36–41. Cahill, Michelle. ‘After the Headlines.’ The Best Australian Poems 2009. Ed. Robert Adamson. Sydney, NSW: Black Inc., 2009. 34. Carman, Luke. ‘Getting Square in a Jerking Circle.’ Meanjin 2016. . Cassidy, Bonny. ‘Axe Derby.’ Poetry May 2016. . Castagna, Felicity. No More Boats. New York: Europa, 2017. Cheng, Melanie. Australia Day. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2017. Cooke, Stuart. ‘(Tony Abbott is a) Flarf Fugue.’ Writing to the Wire. Ed. Dan Disney and Kit Kelen. Crawley: UWAP, 2016. 182. De Kretser, Michelle. The Life to Come. New York: Catapult, 2018. Dovey, Ceridwen. Blood Kin. New York: Penguin, 2007. Dowse, Sara. As the Lonely Fly. Sydney, NSW: For Pity’s Sake, 2018. Etherington, Ben. ‘Craveñho’s Universe.’ Sydney Review of Books 27 Oct. 2017. . Fitch, Toby. ‘27 Materialisations of Sydney Cloud.’ The Best Australian Poems 2017. Ed. Sarah Holland-Batt. Sydney, NSW: Black Inc., 2017. Holland-Batt, Sarah. ‘This Landscape Before Me.’ Poetry Jan. 2011. . Hope, AD. Collected Poems, 1930–1970. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1972. Jones, Gail. Five Bells. Sydney, NSW: Picador, 2012. Kinsella, John. ‘The Shortest Lexicon.’ Crikey 16 Oct. 2018. . Klemperer, Viktor. Lingua Tertii Imperii. New York: Continuum, 2006. Nelson, Alice. The Children’s House. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin, 2018. Synnott, Ashleigh. ‘How Should We Write in a Time of Unmitigated Disaster? On Precarity and Socially Responsible Writing.’ Literary Hub 19 Nov. 2018. . Watts, Madeleine. ‘Rev. Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man.’ Sydney Morning Herald 23 Feb. 2014. . Whittaker, Alison. ‘Two Poems and an Interview.’ Tincture 22 Feb. 2016. . Wood, Charlotte. The Natural Way of Things. New York: Europa, 2016.

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12 TOWARDS A NEW DIRECTION IN CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM Cognitive Australian Literary Studies Jean-François Vernay Australian literary studies started to show the first encouraging signs of influence by cognitive literary studies in the early 2000s, a decade or so after the cognitive turn made its mark on American scholarly publishing. The last, particularly prolific years (2013–2020), have been instrumental in turning cognitive Australian literary studies from an emerging trend into an ever-expanding, ripening discipline, which now begs for a timely synoptic survey. While a much larger number of Australian scholars have been seeking convergence between cognitivism and the humanities at large, this chapter will restrict the scope of discussion to cognitive Australian literary studies, namely, writers dealing with Australian literary studies enhanced by cognitive approaches. It will therefore exclude Australian cognitive literary studies – an even more inclusive category, which would comprise all Australian scholars taking a vested interest in cognitive literary studies. After contextualising cognitive Australian literary studies globally and defining them, this chapter will survey the field of cognitive-inspired Australian fiction and non-fiction and assess how this new direction in contemporary Australian criticism might create sought-after overtures in the Australian humanities.

Towards a Definition of Cognitive Australian Literary Studies While the cognitive turn was heralded by a spate of seminal publications released in the United States from the early 1990s, such as Mark Turner’s Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (1991) and Marie-Laure Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991), the earliest book-length theoretical work in cognitive literary studies was Reuven Tsur’s short treatise entitled What is Cognitive Poetics? (1983). Yet the very definition of this cutting-edge field remains elusive: an interdisciplinary approach, no consonance of paradigms, an inspiration from cognitive science research, a concern for issues in literary studies blended with neurological insights, the use of multiple prisms, and a certain overcautiousness, seem to be the chief characteristics defining this ever-broadening category. The pervasive overcautiousness in the field is a direct consequence of scant knowledge of the brain and its processes, insufficient research in cognitive science focussing on fiction, the technological limitations in brain-imaging techniques, the difficulty of obtaining cut-and-dried findings, not to mention some form of political correctness due to the fact that very few scholars are at ease with discussing the possibility of brain-related gender differences. Though all these major traits can easily be discerned, providing an all-encompassing definition of a field known for its sheer heterogeneity may prove difficult, but I may venture one. Cognitive 116

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literary studies could be summarised as a cluster of various literary criticism-related disciplines forming a broad-based trend which draws on the findings of cognitive science to sharpen their psychological understanding of literature by exploring the mental processes at work in the creative minds of writers and readers. Born in the wake of postmodernism, this ground-breaking conception of literature is revelatory in its attempt to fine-tune a scientific-cum-anthropological perception of fiction by delving into the complexities of the various mental processes it involves. Although conducive to interdisciplinary convergence, the pollination of two highly interdisciplinary fields like cognitive science and literary studies was bound to proliferate into a great many neighbouring disciplines, a complex constellation of subsets which is far from forming a unified research field. It is however possible to divide cognitive literary studies into five major epistemologically related, though disparate, strains which often feed into one another: cognitive literary history (which this present chapter typifies); evolutionary literary criticism (ranging from biocultural approaches to Darwinian literary studies); Neuro Lit Crit (a neurologising approach to literature branching out into neuroaesthetics which covers mainly art, aesthetics and the brain); cognitively informed preexisting theories (encompassing cognitive poetics, cognitive rhetoric, cognitive narratology, cognitive stylistics, cognitive ecocriticism, cognitive queer studies, cognitive postcolonial studies, inter alia); and affective literary theory. Following this broader definition, cognitive Australian literary studies could therefore be defined as literary scholarship concerned with the examination of Australian literature from any of the above-mentioned strains, or even from a blend of any of them. To be sure, it may be problematic to identify whether some of the scholarship qualifies for this category or not. Ultimately, this is a matter of personal appreciation, as there is no official way to indicate how much these studies should borrow from cognitive science or discuss Australian literature to be labelled cognitive Australian literary criticism. Having said this, the primary sources listed in these academic discussions should give a fair idea of their ideological orientation and interest in Australian culture. For instance, Anthony Uhlmann’s ‘Where Literary Studies Is, and What It Does’ (2013) is no exegesis of Australian literature per se, yet it discusses cognitive poetics in relation to professing English literatures, which de facto includes Australian literature, and so comes to be listed in my bibliography of cognitive Australian literary studies. Among the five main strains of cognitive literary studies, affective literary theory is arguably the most dynamic one in Australia as it has benefitted from the multifarious activities of an impressive seven-year collegial project (2011–2018) funded by the Australian Research Council. The generous grant has enabled the establishment of a Centre for the History of Emotions through five university nodes in almost all states (South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia) along with a half-yearly refereed journal – Emotions: History, Culture, Society (2017–ongoing) – published under the auspices of the Society for the History of Emotions, founded in 2016. However, perhaps because of the journal’s multidisciplinary nature, the editors have only included one article dealing with Australian literary studies (McAlister) over the release of four issues. A quick survey of the bibliography included with this chapter should conveniently give a bird’s-eye view of progress made in this emergent field which has been particularly prolific over the past two decades.

Surveying the Field of Cognitive-Inspired Fiction and Non-Fiction In comparison with American and British writers, a cluster of whom have been credited for contributing to the rise of the ‘neuronovel,’ precious few Australian authors have gained the reputation of having written their works under this label, even though a few of them are fascinated by the neuroscience of creative writing.1 However, although their subject matter cannot be described as neurofiction, many contemporary Australian novels are highly conducive to research in cognitive Australian literary studies. The study of what I call neurodivergence fiction appears to fall 117

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squarely in the remit of this innovative field. For instance, Sue Woolfe’s The Secret Cure (2003) and Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project (2013) and its sequels are prime material for cognitive criticism, not to mention Toni Jordan’s Addition (2008), which has already been discussed in terms of cognitive disability for its attention to obsessive-compulsive disorder (see Robertson, ‘Driven by Tens’). It should be added that these cultural representations of characters afflicted by mental disorders are instrumental in helping empathising neurotypical readers come to a better understanding of cognitive difference. Some genres seem to be particularly suited for the cognitivist study of literature, such as crime novels (see Newton) or narratives involving the (sometimes dysfunctional) workings of the mind, such as Peter Kocan’s total institution novellas, The Treatment (1980) and The Cure (1983).2 This also includes books in which the main action is set in a neuroscientific environment or based on neural technology, as exemplified by Colleen McCullough’s On, Off (2005) and Angela Meyer’s A Superior Spectre (2018). Psychological narratives like Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night (2003) and virtually any of Patrick White’s novels, as well as narratives underpinned by or dealing with emotions (such as romance novels or works by J.M. Coetzee, Christos Tsiolkas, and Peter Carey, to mention a few), science and speculative fiction tapping into the unexploited possibilities of the mind typified by Greg Egan’s Quarantine (1992) and Teranesia (1999), true accounts of neurological damage and neuroplastic recovery like David Roland’s How I Rescued my Brain (2014), and trauma accounts such as Meera Atkinson’s recent memoir, Traumata (2018) should all be included here. Indeed, if we are to construe reader reception as a meeting of two minds, that of the writer who produces the text and that of the reader who consumes it, then cognitive Australian literary studies would find its usefulness in analysing any work of literature. This would go a long way towards explaining why Australian children’s literature has received a great deal of critical attention in this field, even though juvenile fiction is not particularly known for being concerned with brainrelated issues. John Stephens is to be credited with being the first Australian scholar to have published his work in the field of cognitive Australian literary studies. His writings on textual patterning in Australian children’s literature draw substantially on schema theory in relation to social cognition. Indeed, the bulk of Australian literary research inspired by cognitive literary criticism between 2002 and 2020 falls into five categories: cognitive readings of Australian literary works (see, for instance, Britten, Pettitt, Rubik, Stephens); creativity-focussed research for which TEXT and Axon journals are the most sought-after publishing outlets (see Brophy, Prendergast, Takolander, Woolfe); body-related investigations (see Giles, Spencer); brain-inspired studies (see Fitzpatrick, Hayles, Newton, Robertson); and writings informed by affect theory (see Barnett and Douglas, Farrell, Gildersleeve, Heister, McAlister, Mudiyanselage, Stasny, Stephens, Thomas). Since cognitive literary studies is particularly adept at disclosing the invisible, namely, not so much what lies within the porous text (the subtext) as what happens in the writer’s or reader’s brain, it makes sense that a great deal of Australian research has focussed on how neuroscience can shed light on creativity. Unsurprisingly, the major contributors to the field are the writers straddling with creative writing and scholarship; poets Maria Takolander and Kevin Brophy, and novelists Sue Woolfe and Julia Prendergast, have been spearheading this Australian research in neurocreativity. In The Mystery of The Cleaning Lady: A Writer Looks at Creativity and Neuroscience (2007), Woolfe takes a rare insider’s perspective into creativity by examining, in turn, a series of engaging and thematically connected topics: literary inspiration and the creative mood, the agency and vivacity of the creative imagination, the interaction of thoughts and images, the transmission of information, emotional involvement and empathy, the creative personality, synaesthesia and metaphor-building, and the defocussing of the mind. It was inspired by Christopher David Stevens’s doctoral dissertation in psychology, for which he interviewed ‘seven successful Australian fiction writers about their insights’ (1) without disclosing their names. Woolfe, who has confessed to have taken part 118

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in this experiment, also elaborates on George Kelly’s discussion of two main forms of thinking. According to this American psychologist, one is to distinguish between ‘“tight” construing (or secondary-process thinking) and “loose” construing (or primary-process thinking),’ in which literary creativity seems to blossom (Woolfe 91). Loose construing therefore involves putting our capacity to anticipate and predict outcomes on hold, thus paving the way to a daydreaming mode in which ‘[ j]udgements are suspended. Self-consciousness and self-censorship are minimised. People often talk of experiencing an altered sense of self, with a loss of the sense of time and place and a blurring of self and others, and self and the world’ (92). Such cutting-edge perspectives on literature and its creative minds are bound to afford ‘overtures’ or ‘openings’ in a long-existing field which Australian literary historiography dates back to 1856 (with the publication of Frederick Sinnett’s essay, ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’).3 It is not hard to see how cognitive Australian literary studies can shed light on hitherto neglected aspects of Australian literature all the while shrewdly renewing its academic approaches and discourse.

A Simmering Field Affording Overtures in the Humanities Within the last three decades, cognitive literary studies has gradually been making its mark on the international publishing arena with a growing number of theoretical works blending scientific approaches with literary theory, a trend which could be seen as narrowing the divide between, as C.P. Snow terms it, ‘The Two Cultures.’ In an irrepressible bout of optimism, this slowly emerging current could even be taken to be the missing link, if not the ideal interface, between science and the humanities. Yet, this new conceptual approach blending humanistic and scientific enquiry is strikingly reminiscent of countless methods of critical analysis which have more or less involved a desire to establish a literary science.4 Giving a new direction to Australian literary criticism under the sway of cognitivism would essentially encourage Australianists to avail themselves of scientific concepts and of substantial knowledge of the human anatomy and physiology at large. They would also be required to take an inventory of the neurobabble that would generate fresh outlooks on Australian literature, understood both as an archive and a practice. With such daunting tasks on the literary agenda, this somewhat controversial new field was bound to meet a great deal of resistance in mainstream academia, given that it might estrange more traditional literary critics from cognitive literary studies. The evidence that some expected form of misoneism is already at work can hardly be gainsaid if one is to briefly analyse the publishers running articles by cognitive literary scholars. A giveaway might be detected in the fact that the overwhelming majority of the essays dealing with Australian fiction has been published outside the classical leading outlets renowned for promoting Australian literary studies, with the exception of Anne Maxwell’s ‘Education, Literature and the Emotions: A Salute to Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher’ (2012) and Michael Farrell’s ‘The Geopoetics of Affect: Bill Neidjie’s Story About Feeling’ (2013) which discusses the affective paradigm in Australian poetry. Both articles came out in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature ( JASAL). As to all the other essays, rather than appearing in Australian Literary Studies, LINQ (which has now been absorbed by eTropic), Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant, Southerly, or Westerly, they have been published in Australian general journals, whether discipline-specific like Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, TEXT, Aurealis, and Axon, or multidisciplinary like Australian Humanities Review and Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. The rest of the scholarship has appeared in international journals (Antipodes, International Research in Children’s Literature, Media Tropes, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, and European Journal of English Studies) or multi-chapter works such as monographs and conference proceedings. What could be quickly dismissed as an umpteenth interdisciplinary approach may hold the key to helping Australian scholars under institutional pressure to remain cutting-edge in their 119

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research activity. At the intersection of literary studies and cognitive science, literary topics such as imagination, realistic depiction, imagery and figures of speech, literary comprehension and reception, identification, the paratext, emotions, fiction reading – in short, ‘language, mental acts and linguistic artefacts’ (Richardson and Steen 1) – are now examined under close scrutiny through the lens of science and reassessed in a more accurate way, which essentially means in accordance with human physiology. This new vision of literature, of its artefacts and their mental processing, provides a refreshing perspective and added value to Australian literary studies. As Michael Burke and Emily T. Troscianko advocate, There are many obvious ways in which the cognitive sciences – disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of the mind – have the potential to enrich literary studies. These disciplines can make substantial contributions to how literary scholars understand processes of textual creation and reception, as well as textually evoked cognition. (141) Cognitive Australian literary studies – very much like cultural studies, which also emerged at a time of crisis in the humanities and was then disparaged in its early phase (see Hall) – could potentially be hailed as widening the scope of the literary issues that narratives generate and granting the Australian literary canon more scope and flexibility. Retrofitting literary criticism with scientific concepts enables the creation of overtures while renewing the paraphernalia of critical tools, both of which would potentially revitalise Australian literary studies. Perception, language, memory, consciousness, emotions, and motivity have, in turn, taken centre stage in the cognitive science debates over the last 50 years. Today, the sheer diversity of mental processes, the complexity of which is gradually being acknowledged and investigated, begs for more research in the field of cognitive science while prompting other disciplines, like Australian literary studies, to reexamine their long-held assumptions in the face of the latest discoveries. As an offshoot of this context, cognitive Australian literary studies aims at guiding readers through the complexities underlying the creation, comprehension, and consumption of fiction while renewing the tradition of Australian literary criticism by redefining its concepts, goals, and priorities. By colouring the language of Australian literary criticism with cognitive methodology or explanatory frameworks and by affording a shift of angle which reconfigures the whole field of literary studies, cognitive Australian literary studies is perhaps on its way to find its pertinence in our increasingly brainbased society. The interpenetration of cognitive science and Australian literary studies could be construed as the logical outcome of a field eager to ‘reinvigorate the study of Australian literature both locally and internationally.’ However, to date, it is worth noting that the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series, which overtly nurtures this ambition, has not yet published a monograph informed by cognitive literary studies. Rather, the twelve titles that have been issued so far have adopted mainstream approaches to Australian literary criticism. There is no doubt that the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive Australian literary studies would help the Australian humanities and the cognitive sciences engage in a fruitful dialogue. The cross-fertilisation of literary studies with the mind sciences could help narrow the divide between these rivalling disciplines while preventing the intellectual breathlessness which might ensue from excessive specialisation. The persistent push in Australian universities for interdisciplinary necessity would be conducive to the flourishing of this discipline which could increase student cohorts and broaden audiences while giving graduates more versatility to their profiles. It appears that the current scholarship in cognitive Australian literary criticism comes across as isolated yet brave endeavours to bridge the gap between Australian literature and cutting-edge forms of literary reception. The organisation of this emergent domain in clusters of research centres in which cognitive Australian literary critics could participate in more concerted action will 120

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be a decisive factor for this field to become a new direction in contemporary Australian criticism. As Australian literary studies are cyclically looking for a renewal of paradigm shifts, cognitive inflected readings would perhaps be less a chance to provide fresh insightful readings of literary writings than a magic solution to make up for what Leigh Dale sees as ‘the relative paucity of high-quality studies in Australian literature and literary theory’ (131).

Notes







Works Cited Alder, Hans, and Sabine Gross. ‘Adjusting the Frame: Comments on Cognitivism and Literature.’ Poetics Today 23.2 (2002): 195–196. Barnett, Tully, and Kate Douglas. ‘Teaching Traumatic Life Narratives: Affect, Witnessing, and Ethics.’ Antipodes 28.1 (2014): 46–62. Britten, Adrielle. ‘The Family and Adolescent Wellbeing: Alternative Models of Adolescent Growth in the Novels of Judith Clarke.’ International Research in Children’s Literature 7.2 (2014): 165–179. Brophy, Kevin. Patterns of Creativity. Investigations into the Sources and Methods of Creativity. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. ———. ‘The Poet and the Criminal: Dreams, Neuroscience and a Peculiar Way of Thinking,’ TEXT 18.2 (2014). . Burke, Michael, and Emily T. Troscianko. ‘Mind, Brain and Literature: A Dialogue on What the Humanities Might Offer the Cognitive Sciences.’ Journal of Literary Semantics 42. 2 (2013): 141–148. Cave, Terence. Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Dale, Leigh. ‘New Directions: Introduction.’ Australian Literary Studies 19.2 (1999): 131–135. Farrell, Michael. ‘The Geopoetics of Affect: Bill Neidjie’s Story About Feeling.’ JASAL 13.2 (2013). . Fitzpatrick, Claire. ‘Neuroscience in Science Fiction: Brain Augmentation in an Increasingly Futuristic World.’ Aurealis 105 (2017): 29–32. Gildersleeve, Jessica. Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2017. Giles, Fiona. ‘Milkbrain: Writing the Cognitive Body.’ Australian Humanities Review 43 (2007). . Hall, Stuart. ‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities.’ October 53 (1990): 11–23. Hayles, Katherine. ‘Greg Egan’s Quarantine and Teranesia: Contributions to the Millennial Reassessment of Consciousness and the Cognitive Nonconscious.’ Science Fiction Studies 42.1 (2015): 56–77. Heister, Hilmar. ‘Empathy and the Sympathetic Imagination in the Fiction of JM Coetzee.’ Media Tropes 4.2 (2014): 98–113. Lilley, Rozanna. Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life. Nedlands, WA: UWAP, 2018. McAlister, Jody. ‘“Feelings Like the Women in Books”: Declarations of Love in Australian Romance Novels, 1859–1891.’ Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2.1 (2018): 91–112. Mudiyanselage, Kumarasinghe Dissanayake. ‘Encouraging Empathy through Picture Books about Migration.’ Picture Books and Beyond. Ed. Kerry Mallan. Newtown, NSW: Primary English Teaching Association Australia, 2014. 75–91.

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Jean-François Vernay Newton, Pamela. ‘Beyond the Sensation Novel: Social Crime Fiction and Qualia of the Real World.’ Literature and Sensation. Ed. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephen McLaren. Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 34–49. Pettitt, Joanne. ‘On Blends and Abstractions: Children’s Literature and the Mechanisms of Holocaust Representation.’ International Research in Children’s Literature 7.2 (2014): 152–164. Prendergast, Julia. ‘Grinding the Moor – Ideasthesia and Narrative.’ New Writing 15.4 (2018): 416–432. ———. ‘Narrative and the Unthought Known: The Immaterial Intelligence of Form.’ TEXT 23.1 (2019). . Richardson, Alan, and Francis F. Steen. ‘Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: An Introduction.’ Poetics Today 23.1 (2002): 1–8. Robertson, Rachel. Reaching One Thousand: A Story of Love, Motherhood and Autism. Melbourne, VIC: Black Inc., 2012. ———. ‘“Driven by Tens”: Obsession and Cognitive Difference in Toni Jordan’s Romantic Comedy Addition.’ Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 3.3 (2014): 311–320. Rubik, Margarete. ‘Provocative and Unforgettable: Peter Carey’s Short Fiction.’ European Journal of English Studies 9.2 (2005): 169–184. Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959. Spencer, Beth. The Body as Fiction/Fiction as a Way of Thinking. Unpublished PhD diss. University of Ballarat, 2006. ———. ‘A Response to Fiona Giles, “Milkbrain: Writing the Cognitive Body.”’ Australian Humanities Review 43 (2007). . Stasny, Angélique. ‘Settler-Indigenous Relationships and the Emotional Regime of Empathy in Australian History School Textbooks in Times of Reconciliation.’ Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present. Ed. Laurajane Smith, Margaret Wetherell, and Gary Campbell. London: Routledge, 2018. 246–264. Stephens, John. ‘Writing by Children, Writing for Children: Schema Theory, Narrative Discourse and Ideology.’ Crossing the Boundaries. Ed. Michèle Anstey and Geoff Bull. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education, 2002. 237–248. ———. ‘Affective Strategies, Emotion Schemas, and Empathic Endings: Selkie Girls and a Critical Odyssey.’ Explorations into Children’s Literature 23.1 (2015): 17–33. ———. ‘Picturebooks and Ideology.’ The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Ed. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. London: Routledge, 2017. 137–145. Stevens, Christopher David. Crooked Paths to Insight: The Pragmatic of Loose and Tight Construing. Unpublished PhD diss. University of Wollongong, 1999. Takolander, Maria. ‘After Romanticism, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism: New Paradigms for Theorising Creativity.’ TEXT 18.2 (2014). . ———. ‘Dissanayake’s “Motherese” and Poetic Praxis: Theorising Emotion and Inarticulacy.’ Axon 4.1 (2014). . ———. ‘A Dark/Inscrutable Workmanship: Shining a “Scientific” Light on Emotion and Poiesis.’ Axon Capsule 1 (2015). . ———. ‘From the “Mad” Poet to the “Embodied” Poet: Reconceptualising Creativity through Cognitive Science Paradigms.’ TEXT 19.2 (2015). . Thomas, Diana Mary Eva. Textiles in Text: Synaesthesia, Metaphor and Affect in Fiction. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2017. Uhlmann, Anthony. ‘Where Literary Studies Is, and What It Does.’ Australian Literary Studies 28.1–2 (2013): 98–110. Vernay, Jean-François. ‘The Art of Penning the March Hare In: The Treatment of Insanity in Australian Total Institution Fiction.’ AUMLA 118 (2012): 87–103. ———. The Seduction of Fiction: A Plea for Putting Emotions Back into Literary Interpretation. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Woolfe, Sue. The Mystery of The Cleaning Lady: A Writer Looks at Creativity and Neuroscience. Crawley: UWAP, 2007.

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SECTION D

Australian Literary Studies in the Public Sphere

13 LITERARY CRITICISM IN AUSTRALIA Emmett Stinson

Literary criticism in Australia would appear to bifurcate into two reasonably distinct categories, which might be termed scholarly and popular criticism. These categories do not reflect hierarchies of value, but rather the relationship of criticism to different contexts, institutions, and audiences, since many individual critics practice across both of these forms. By scholarly criticism, I mean literary criticism produced by credentialed academics for other scholars, which has gone through a process of peer review and meets the criteria for research publications regulated by the Australian Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC). This is a specialised and bureaucratised mode of criticism, which is not aimed at broader readerships, and has direct and measurable effects on both the institutional and personal prestige of scholars. By popular criticism, I mean criticism of literary works produced by skilled (though not necessarily credentialed) critics aimed at more general audiences and published in either print or digital magazines, journals, newspapers, or other periodicals. The most prevalent form of this kind of criticism is probably the book review, although this chapter will focus on popular literary criticism that engages with broader literary debates. The state of scholarly literary criticism in Australia resists any easy summary, because it has far too many fields and subfields to present a unified object. Australian academic literary criticism includes single-author studies and traditional hermeneutic interpretation as well as historical and archival approaches, literary sociology, digital humanities, postcolonial criticism, ecocriticism, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary theory – among many others. Despite its manifold forms, Australian scholarly criticism can readily be quantified, because of its regulation and metricisation through government data collection, which not only categorises publications by type (books, book chapter, journal articles, edited collections and so forth), but also counts total publications across ‘Field of Research’ (FOR) codes. The Literary Studies FOR is 2005, and this code has seen a significant increase in the number of publications over the 2003–2016 period during which data were collected; in this category, there were 614 research outputs per annum from 2003 to 2008 (ERA 2010), 652 outputs per annum from 2009 to 2010 (ERA 2012), 655 per annum from 2010 to 2013 (ERA 2015), and 703 from 2014 to 2016 (ERA 2018). While this count does not clarify if there have been movements between different kinds of outputs (between books, articles, and book chapters), the 2018 Excellence in Research for Australia report does offer a breakdown for the 2014–2016 period: of the counted outputs, 50% were journal articles, 41% were book chapters in edited collections, 7% were books, 1% were conference papers, and 1% were ‘non-traditional research outputs,’ which can include creative works. Regardless, literary studies has seen a 14.4% increase in the total number of academic literary publications 125

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between 2003 and 2016. This suggests that scholarly criticism of literature is in no danger of disappearing, and cannot even said to be in decline, even though some of its key institutional supports seem perhaps less certain. From 2017, HERDC no longer counts annual research outputs or uses them as a basis for establishing university funding and has placed increased emphasis on grant and external funding as indicators of success; it remains to be seen how this change might affect the production of academic literary research. Academic literary criticism is often supplemented by work undertaken in the area of creative writing (which is captured by the FOR code 1904 for performing arts and creative writing), which often engages with literary works, literary communities, and related issues that certainly resemble literary criticism, even if they are not captured by the 2005 code. It is difficult to ascertain the total contribution of creative writing to literary studies, however, because this code also includes non-literary research about the performing arts. Regardless, it needs to be acknowledged that, as a result of growing creative writing enrolments, many undergraduate students now primarily encounter literary criticism – by which I mean both scholarly literary research and the practical criticism of literature – through the creative writing workshop. Indeed, as D.G. Myers has noted, creative writing has emerged as ‘an alternative institutional practice for the study of literature’ (287), although it has not always been recognised as such, particularly by literary scholars. Scholarly criticism differs from popular literary criticism in important ways: it is regulated by government-defined conceptions of research and research outputs; it is subjected to usually rigorous peer review prior to publication; its intended audience comprises other scholars who hold or are pursuing advanced degrees; and its explicit purpose (at least as far as universities and HERDC are concerned) is the creation and dissemination of new knowledge rather than aesthetic judgement. Scholarly criticism is also governed by a series of conventions that are passed down both formally and informally during the research training process: scholarly arguments are meant to be governed by strict logical relationships, terms are usually rigorously defined, and arguments need to consider and respond to prior, relevant scholarship. In short, scholarly arguments are meant to be built on logic and assessable evidence, rather than rhetorical or emotional flourishes; scholarly arguments are thus meant to be very different from the polemical or evaluative language often associated with popular literary criticism. Julieanne Lamond, a literary academic at the Australian National University who also writes book reviews, has usefully reflected on the differences between popular literary criticism (as book reviewing) and scholarly criticism: I write reviews … because it enables me to read works of contemporary fiction slowly and carefully, to consider them in detail and with my scholarly habits of comparing them to other works and writing in probably boring detail about how they use narrative point of view. But … they also force me to do something that we as scholars are very wary of doing in public: deciding how good we think a particular work of literature is. These days, and for good reasons, the last thing most literary studies scholars want to do is to be (or be seen to be) gatekeepers of cultural hierarchy. But we are, and when we write reviews we have to do it ‘naked’ – as individual readers, with a public to judge our judgements. (‘This is Not a Book Review’) Lamond’s reflection makes two significant points. First of all, scholarly criticism generally avoids the explicit aesthetic judgements that have traditionally been associated with the act of literary criticism. Elsewhere, Lamond has linked this refusal of such judgements with ‘the inherent suspicion of canonicity of my generation of scholars and feminists (and the generation that went just before me)’; for Lamond, the ‘question of what makes a book important, or even very good, is difficult’ because aesthetic judgements are anything but disinterested and often covertly reinscribe 126

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exclusionary practices (‘Believing in Fairies’). Lamond’s distinction here is reaffirmed by Leigh Dale and Linda Hale, who argue that ‘reviews published in newspapers or magazines evaluate a book, and implicitly or explicitly direct a reader to buy – or not to buy – the book being discussed,’ while ‘criticism’s main function is interpretation rather than evaluation, and it is written for a specialist, or for someone seeking a more nuanced discussion of the work.’ Second, however, Lamond notes that, despite scholarly reticence towards explicit judgements, both popular and academic criticism are involved in the cultural mediation of literary works. The difference is that, in scholarly criticism, these value judgements are often implicit and signalled by the very act of training scholarly attention upon a given work or genre: here the act of holding up a work as worthy of study signals its inherent worth. Thus, while there are different institutional contexts and audience expectations, both forms of criticism are part of the so-called ‘book production circuit’ (see Darnton) that mediates works of literature for the public, and both engage in forms of literary valuation, although often with different degrees of explicitness. The apparently sharp distinction between popular and scholarly criticism is undermined by a further fact: many well-known reviewers also hold advanced degrees. For example, such well-regarded book reviewers as James Ley, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Ed Wright, Shannon Burns, Delia Falconer, and Melinda Harvey hold PhDs. Many of them have also worked in academia in various capacities, and Falconer (University Technology Sydney) and Harvey (Monash University) both hold full-time employment as academics and are notable scholars in the own right. Many other academics write occasional book reviews or literary critical articles for various literary journals, newspapers, and other periodicals. Thus, while the institutional contexts of scholarly and popular criticism diverge, the practitioners of these forms often overlap. But despite the clear intersection of these communities, professional literary criticism and scholarly literary criticism often conceive of themselves as inherently opposed. In a 2008 debate with the Australian scholar Ken Gelder, the prominent reviewer, Peter Craven, underscored what he saw as the difference between professional and academic critics: You see, Professor Gelder and I represent very different things. I’m a shirtsleeves critic, the kind of chap who’s always plagued the activity of writing by reporting back in the marketplace and saying whether or not he reckons it’s any good, whether it’s worth reading … Ken Gelder, on the other hand, is to be found at the centre of one of those places that used to be thought of … as departments of literature, or simply ‘English’ (as in ‘English literature’), but which now are concerned with the broad study of culture and with questions of cultural production (as it’s called), and with the widest range of stuff with which people might amuse themselves – with movies and television, with soap operas and cartoons, with kung-fu and computer games. Craven’s argument, though broadly incorrect (since virtually all Australian English programmes focus on texts, while other programmes, such as Cultural Studies, Screen Studies, and Media Studies, primarily examine these other cultural forms), is interesting in that it takes up a perhaps-unexpected line of attack: Craven suggests that English departments are failures precisely because they have ceased to focus on literature and have shifted their attentions to broader forms of cultural production. The problem with this switch, for Craven, is that this focus denies any special status for literature by suggesting that popular culture is an equally acceptable object of analysis: ‘Ken Gelder and I are both concerned with trash and treasure. I love the treasure even as I enjoy the trash. Ken, I think, wants to let the trash into the treasure-trove. For him it’s all trash, all treasure.’ This analysis does dovetail in interesting ways with Lamond’s own analysis, when she discusses her concerns about making literary judgements as a scholar. For Craven, these 127

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judgements are and should be constitutive of the work of literary criticism, and to give them up or avoid them means that scholarly criticism is effectively not criticism at all. There are obvious problems with Craven’s claims: clearly there are and should be ways to undertake literary criticism and investigation without recourse to evaluative judgements as such. Indeed, Gelder criticises Craven on precisely this aspect of his argument, noting that Craven ‘has somehow managed to become more highbrow and judgement-driven than any English academic I know. He is a kind of anachronistic contradiction: part Grub Street and part Alexander Pope.’ Nonetheless, as I noted above, academics often do signal their judgements in implicit and indirect ways, rather than eschewing them altogether. But the core of Craven’s claim – which is that academic criticism is not interested in defending the special status of a core set of canonical literary texts – is one that is often repeated by popular critics who are sceptical of academic criticism. A similar argument runs through Geordie Williamson’s The Burning Library (2012), when he argues that ‘[i]t is thanks to Cultural Studies that you may now study Jackie Collins’ The Stud at Melbourne University but nothing by Randolph Stow’ (5). Williamson differs from Craven in that his argument is motivated by a left critique of postmodernism cosmopolitanism as an elitist position that is ‘paraded as a democratic virtue’ but ‘bought with the kind of long leisure that few working people could afford’ (5). Given these concerns, Williamson’s critique of scholarly criticism is far more ambivalent; he notes that ‘engagement with postcolonial concerns has granted indigenous writing … the attention it deserved’ and enabled ‘migrant voices’ to complicate ‘in fruitful ways our notions of nationhood and identity’ (7). For Williamson, however, this necessary broadening of the canon was accompanied by a detrimental push ‘to downgrade the reputation of figures from decades when Ozlit flourished. For each new author lionised and taught by literature departments around the country, some older voice was set aside’ (7). Here, Williamson imagines a zero-sum economics of attention, and the failure of academic scholarship has been a failure to balance the historically significant works of a fledgling Australian cannon with the new products of a postcolonial literature. For him, this failure to adequately respect the past is dangerous because, ‘Unlike the more settled literary traditions of Britain and Europe, Australian literature had little in the way of cultural capital stored up when subjected to the full force of theory’s interrogations’ (8). Williamson, essentially, is a literary nationalist who accuses scholarly critics of failing to support and nurture a national literature that struggles to compete with the works produced by larger and older Anglophone nations. But despite such claims, the fact is that many academics have continued to contribute to public conversations about literature in explicitly polemical and provocative ways that bear little relationship to the postmodern strawmen conjured by either Craven or Williamson. Perhaps the most provocatively titled essay of this kind remains Andrew McCann’s 2004 Overland essay, ‘How to Fuck a Tuscan Garden: A Note on Literary Pessimism,’ which critiques ‘mediocre Australian fiction’ while also concluding that the ‘structures that are constantly calling out for innovative Australian writing are the very same structures that impede its development’ (24). Mark Davis, in the essays ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm’ (2007) and ‘Who Needs Cultural Gatekeepers Anyway’ (2018) has polemically argued that the literary sphere’s own influence is waning as a result of larger cultural, industrial, and technological changes. In a series of essays written under the moniker of ‘Critic Watch’ in the Sydney Review of Books, Western Sydney University academic Ben Etherington has scrutinised Australian book reviewing practices in order ‘to interrogate judgements of taste and the way such conspicuous acts of discrimination shape the literary field’ thereby reading ‘criticism against its critical object, and consider[ing] the plausibility of the judgements being made.’ Here, rather than eschewing literary judgements, a scholarly critic is deploying literary criticism’s own techniques against itself for a popular audience. As these examples demonstrate, scholarly interventions in public criticism often readily embrace both polemic and judgement. In this sense, the apparent distinction between scholarly and popular criticism appears increasingly blurry. 128

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Indeed, not all forms of popular criticism necessarily seek to foreground literary judgements in the way that Craven suggests either, and many of Australia’s most prominent book reviewers intentionally eschew explicit judgement in favour of interpretation and analysis. As Pascall Prize recipient Kerryn Goldsworthy notes: I try to avoid direct expressions of evaluation – except in extreme cases, I don’t think the worth of a book can be confidently quantified – and, as a result, can sometimes find that I haven’t made my judgement as clearly as readers might have liked; I prefer to make more indirect comment on the book’s value by using descriptive terms with positive or negative connotations. (22) James Ley, also a winner of the Pascall Prize, has similarly stated that ‘[w]henever I write a sentence that sounds like the kind of thing that gets plastered across a book cover, I cross it out’ (29). While both Ley and Goldsworthy have PhDs and have taught in university programmes, I would argue that their reticence to offer explicit judgements is less a reflection of a scholarly disposition than a particular kind of literary aesthetics; both writers effectively view literary criticism as itself a literary form, which employs indirection and understatement and leaves it to readers to infer implicit judgements. The above examples of literary criticism in Australia primarily derive from popular essays, books, and other interventions that reflect on large issues in Australian literary criticism, and which are usually polemical in some form. However, it needs to be emphasised that the overwhelming majority of popular literary criticism in Australia takes one specific form: the book review. There many different kinds of reviewing outlets in Australia, which include newspapers, dedicated review publications like Australian Book Review, literary journals, popular magazines like The Monthly and The Big Issue, publishing industry publications like Books+Publishing, bookseller generated publications like Readings Monthly, and online journals like The Sydney Review of Books. All of these publications have different audiences and therefore place a different emphasis on the book review, but probably the dominant form is the ‘capsule’ review, which seeks to summarise a book and offer a brief comment or judgement upon it in a very short space of 100–300 words. Most long reviews in these publications do not go much beyond 800 words. Longform book reviews of several thousand words usually only appear in the major metropolitan newspapers, literary journals, dedicated review publications, and a few popular magazines with a highbrow bent. In other words, the vast majority of popular literary criticism in Australia is the mode of book reviewing that primarily serves as a form of indirect marketing, which is presented as an informed consumer recommendation. This is not a value judgement, but rather an acknowledgment of the inherently hybrid nature of book reviewing, which combines literary criticism, advertising, and news reporting (since a book’s publication is a newsworthy ‘event’). Popular literary criticism beyond the book review is an extremely small niche within Australian literary cultures, and there are, for example, no publications that are dedicated to, or even primarily practise, this literary form. Perhaps the only publication in Australia that comes close to such a descriptor is the online journal, The Sydney Review of Books, established in 2013, which operates on a model similar to the Los Angeles Review of Books. The Sydney Review of Books primarily publishes longform book reviews, although most of these engage in broad literary debates or interact with scholarly research in various ways. Indeed, many of the essays are even peer-reviewed and written by academics. Otherwise, however, essays of popular literary criticism mostly appear in print and online literary journals like Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Overland, and so forth. These journals themselves have relatively small readerships in print (usually less than 3000), and while their online readerships might be broader, they are usually restricted to those already interested in the field of Australian literature, rather than a broader public. In this sense, the impact of such criticism 129

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tends to be limited to the cultural field of Australian literature itself, and primarily to those who are in some form agents in the literary field, such as writers, scholars, other reviewers, employees of publishing companies, or students involved in the study of creative writing or literature. Debates around popular criticism of literature in Australia have often focussed on notions of its decline or increasing irrelevance from developments in the public sphere. Even the creation of The Sydney Review of Books was motivated by this essentially defensive posture, as Mark Davis notes: ‘[c]oncerns about the reduced space for serious cultural criticism in the mainstream media prompted the establishment of the Sydney Review of Books’ (‘Cultural Gatekeepers’). Some of these concerns around the decline of criticism more or less appear to stem from this perception, as in the case of Gideon Haigh’s 2010 essay ‘Feeding the Hand that Bites: The Demise of Australian Literary Reviewing,’ which argues that ‘the books pages of Australian newspapers and magazines have become’ a ‘wasteland’ in which no genuinely critical sentiments are ever expressed. The first essay from Critic Watch at The Sydney Review of Books sought to make a similar argument through a case study of reviews of Anna Funder’s All That I Am (2011), arguing that ‘a weak reception has given the novel the aura of profundity that it has not earned.’ Some of these concerns have relied on quantitative analysis: Sybil Nolan and Matthew Ricketson have undertaken surveys of book reviews in newspapers, which demonstrate not only that the number of pages in the reviews section has decreased but also that increased copy-sharing across newspapers means that fewer reviews are produced overall. Other accounts have used sentiment analysis to demonstrate that many published book reviews do seek to temper their critical assessments with praise (see Stinson). This narrative of decline does seem to be partially substantiated by data in the AustLit database. By searching for ‘single works’ tagged as literary criticism in the twenty-first century, a clear downward pattern emerges: the total number of critical works produced every year after 2012 is lower than any year from 2000 to 2011 (see Table 13.1). To put it another way, from 2000 to 2011, an average of 924.6 single works of literary criticism were published each year. From 2012 to 2017, that figure drops to 764.5, a decline of 17.4%. Table 13.1 Australian Works of Literary Criticism 2000–2017 Year

Criticism ‘Single Work’

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

818 1027 927 831 875 811 840 986 852 1190 1088 851 780 713 822 664 781 741

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Davis has perhaps offered the most critical account of this decline, noting baldly that a ‘thundering review from an established critic no longer has the power it once had’ (‘Cultural Gatekeepers’). While I think this assessment is broadly correct, it arguably has more to do with a set of institutional and industrial changes than any failures internal to criticism itself. For one, there are comparatively few book reviewing venues in Australia, and the pay rates for book reviews have not materially increased since the 1990s (and in some cases have decreased). Australian Book Review editor, Peter Rose has recently claimed that the publication’s ‘minimum payment is A$300’ and often ‘far more than that’ (‘In Defence of Book Reviewers’) – but, when one considers the time needed to read a book and produce a review, even these amounts do not necessarily exceed the minimum wage. For this reason, there have been only a handful of ‘professional’ book reviewers over the last decade in Australia – such as Craven, Williamson, Ley, and Goldsworthy – for the simple reason that it is not an economically viable career for even the most skilled reviewers. The viability of book reviewing careers has also been undermined by a difficult period in the book trade; between 2011 and 2018 almost every major book market has not experienced annual growth above inflation (Wischenbart 4). Many significant Australian reviewers, such as James Bradley, have divided careers between publishing fiction and book reviewing, but even such ‘portfolio’ reviewing careers are increasingly precarious. Davis has argued that the decreased relevance of reviewers (as a kind of literary gatekeeper) can also be explained by another factor: ‘The power to consecrate cultural texts, now, rests in the hands of readers, algorithms and big data, in recommendation engines, book blogs and vlogs, hashtags, podcasts, on-line bookstore reviews, self-publishing portals, podcasts, literary portals, and Goodreads reviews’ (‘Cultural Gatekeepers’). While there are some compelling aspects of Davis’s claim, it is worth underscoring that many Australian practitioners of literary criticism have been enthusiastic adopters of digital technology. Many prominent public critics have produced literary blogs, including Bradley (City of Tongues), Goldsworthy (Still Life with Cat), and Ley (The Medusa vs the Odalisque). Moreover, long-running sites like the ANZ LitLovers LitBlog run by Lisa Hill produce reviews that are similar in kind to those produced by ‘professional’ publications. Many print literary publications also began producing blogs (many of which now have become more formalised websites or online publications). Between 2005 and 2015 or so, these literary blogs often provided a lively space for online discussion of literary matters, and were arguably a key site for Australian literary discourse. Daniel Green, one of the most prominent literary bloggers in the United States, has noted the way that literary blogs brought to light different kinds of books: What distinguished many if not most of these blogs from ‘mainstream’ literary coverage was not the casual way in which opinions were sometimes offered (print reviews could be just as opinionated, but they were acceptably cloaked in journalistic customs), but the objects of those opinions, which tended to be not the usual literary fiction by unofficially certified authors but works by lesser-known writers, often published by independent presses. In this sense, literary blogs, rather than undermining literary discourse, actually enabled new literary discussions and supported different kinds of publications. Green does note that ‘blogs no longer dominate literary discourse online because they have been supplemented and to a degree replaced by web-based critical journals and book reviews’ – a statement that certainly applies to Australia, too, where literary blogs have increasingly been supplanted by entirely online literary journals like The Sydney Review of Books and Mascara Literary Review, or else the online offerings of print literary journals like Overland, Meanjin, and The Lifted Brow, among many others. But other forms of online literary criticism have arguably thrived; in particular, Australian literary podcasts, such as The Rereaders and The Garret, have become increasingly important forums for 131

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literary criticism and discussion. In this sense, Davis’s account of digital media as undermining literary discourse probably does not adequately acknowledge the ambivalent role of the internet. Green perhaps more adequately captures the duality of the internet for literary criticism, noting that while the internet offers ‘a space somewhat independent of the commercial imperative, where a certain degree of idealism [can] help to determine the terms and scope of the critical conversation,’ this seemingly autonomous space is undermined by ‘data harvesting and digital “influencers.”’ Digital media thus presents a realm that is arguably simultaneously hostile and hospitable to literary criticism; it may decrease some of literary criticism’s gatekeeping power, but also arguably enables new and different kinds of discussions. Finally, it is essential to mention a third although rarely acknowledged form of literary criticism, which might be called ‘vernacular criticism.’ This refers to informal literary criticism that exists outside of the reception circuits of either scholarly or professional publishing. Vernacular criticism encompasses a wide variety of practices from book reviews on social reading sites to amateur literary blogs to literary conversations among members of book clubs, and perhaps even to classroom discussions within tertiary and secondary educational institutions. In this sense, vernacular criticism is not a unified field but a term that seeks to capture, however provisionally, the everyday practice of criticism by Australian readers of all kinds. It is, of course, nearly impossible to capture the totality of such discourse even though online sites like Amazon and Goodreads increasingly make visible the thoughts and opinions of everyday readers. Nonetheless, it is essential to recall that these practices of criticism are ultimately what make scholarly and popular criticism possible: academic or professional modes of reviewing are effectively specialised versions of the kinds of thoughts and conversation that normal Australian readers have every day.

Works Cited Australian Research Council. Excellence in Research for Australia 2010 National Report. 2011. . ———. Excellence in Research for Australia 2012 National Report. 2013. . ———. Excellence in Research for Australia 2015 National Report. 2016. . ———. Excellence in Research for Australia 2018 National Report. 2019. . Craven, Peter, and Ken Gelder. ‘Criticism and Fiction in Australia.’ Overland 192 (2008). . Dale, Leigh, and Linda Hale. ‘Introduction.’ AustLit Anthology of Criticism. 2010. . Darnton, Robert. ‘What is the History of Books?’ Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65–83. Davis, Mark. ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing.’ Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007. 116–131. ———. ‘Who Needs Cultural Gatekeepers Anyway?’ Sydney Review of Books 17 Jul. 2018. . Etherington, Ben (as Critic Watch). ‘The Brain Feign: All That I Am by Anna Funder.’ Sydney Review of Books 29 Jan. 2013. . Goldsworthy, Kerryn. ‘Everyone’s a Critic.’ Australian Book Review 351 (2013): 20–30. Green, Daniel. ‘Criticism in Cyberspace.’ Open Letters Monthly Review 12 Jan. 2018. . Haigh, Gideon. ‘Feeding the Hand that Bites: The Demise of Australian Literary Reviewing.’ Kill Your Darlings 1 Mar. 2010. . Lamond, Julieanne. ‘This Is Not a Book Review: Women, the Middlebrow and the Sydney Review of Books.’ Feminartsy 16 Dec. 2015. .

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Literary Criticism in Australia ———. ‘Believing in Fairies: The Good People by Hannah Kent.’ Sydney Review of Books 30 Nov. 2016. . McCann, Andrew. ‘How to Fuck a Tuscan Garden: A Note on Literary Pessimism.’ Overland 177 (2004): 22–24. Myers, DG. ‘The Rise of Creative Writing.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993): 277–297. Ricketson, Matthew, and Sybil Nolan. ‘Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Structural Reform in the Newspaper Industry on the Marketing of Books.’ By the Book? Contemporary Publishing in Australia. Ed. Emmett Stinson. Clayton, VIC: Monash UP, 2013. 29–39. Rose, Peter. ‘In Defence of Book Reviewers in Australia.’ Conversation 11 Jul. 2014. . Stinson, Emmett. ‘How Nice Is Too Nice? Australian Book Reviews and the “Compliment Sandwich.”’ Australian Humanities Review 60 (2016). . Williamson, Geordie. The Burning Library: Our Great Novelists Lost and Found. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2012. Wischenbart, Rüdiger. Business of Books 2018: New Tunes for an Old Trade. White Paper for the Frankfurt Book Fair. 10–14 Oct. 2018. .

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14 OBSTETRIC REALISM AND SACRED COWS Women Writers and Book Reviewing in Australia Melinda Harvey and Julieanne Lamond Book reviews – a means of evaluating works of literature and introducing them to the reading public – have been a feature of settler-colonial Australia since at least 1824 when the first review was published in this country, and women have long had unequal access to them as authors and as reviewers.1 This chapter provides an overview of some common attitudes to books by women in Australian reviews since the nineteenth century as well as some key flashpoints in the history of Australian women’s writing in which reviews played a part. Specifically, we identify some gendered tropes that recur in reviews about the books of Australian women authors and collate the responses of women writers to being reviewed in such ways. From Miles Franklin to Barbara Baynton, Christina Stead to Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Helen Garner to Antigone Kefala, we find remarkable continuities in the discussions of women writers and their work, which amount to a devaluation of their individual accomplishments and contribution to Australian literature. We also highlight debates that have flared across the twentieth century, concerning the reception of women’s writing in this country, and discuss the connection between these debates and recent attempts to quantify gender bias in the book pages of Australia’s magazines and newspapers with the aim of ending it. We start with a familiar story about nineteenth-century Australian women writers. It goes like this: settler-colonial Australian writing in the lead up to Federation was shoe-horned into the service of a new national literary ‘tradition’ that was explicitly and unapologetically masculine.2 This framework for reading and writing about literature shaped how women writers were reviewed, especially in nationalist outlets such as The Bulletin. As Susan Sheridan has shown, ‘Australian literature’ was equated with literary subjects and modes that were coded masculine: the bush, male characters, and realism principal among them (Faultlines 28). Katherine Bode’s recent study of over 21,000 pieces of nineteenth-century fiction in Trove’s digital historical newspaper collection confirms this emphasis: the keywords ‘creek sheep cattle horses men verandah hut country man horse’ are most prominent in the Australian writing in the dataset (‘Appendix’). Writers of sophisticated urban romance such as Ada Cambridge, Tasma and Rosa Praed were derided in reviews as ‘Anglo-Australian’ ‘lady novelists.’ The Bulletin’s literary critic A.G. Stephens wrote of Cambridge: ‘She does not claim recognition as an Australian writer: her men and women might be staged anywhere … As an English writer, she is scarcely distinguished’ (qtd in Cantrell 84). It should be noted, however, that these writers were widely and often positively reviewed in British and American periodicals (Lamond, ‘Anglo-Australian’). Back in Australia, women writers who drew upon The Bulletin’s preferred tropes were reviewed in more positive – though often circumscribed – ways. Realism was a term of praise for 134

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nationalist critics, and book reviews were the place where what constituted realism in Australian culture was defined. It was, for example, in a review of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) that Stephens made his famous claim that it was ‘time to end the error of seeing Australia through English spectacles’ (‘A Bookful’). However, plaudits for realism in the writing of women such as Franklin and Barbara Baynton were diluted by what Mary Ellmann later dubbed ‘phallic criticism.’ Their books were ‘treated as though they [were] themselves women,’ with writers and protagonists often conflated and an associated prurient interest in their bodies was on display ( Ellman 29). The confusion of author and narrator is clear, for example, in reviews of Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902). In Stephens’s review of the book for The Bulletin Baynton is described as ‘a jaundiced observer; all her experiences have been tragic; all her impressions are impressions of horror and disgust’ (Stephens, Untitled 2). In this review, we see the contortions involved in celebrating a woman writer for her realism at the same time as insisting that this realism stems from life and not from art. Stephens asserts that ‘the apex of literary art’ requires three steps be taken: first, a work provides a ‘statement of the thing seen’; second, it raises the stakes for the events and characters to become representative of a type; and third, it ‘becomes universal in its reference’ (2). Bush Studies, according to this schema, … ranks with the masterpieces of literary realism in any language. On the first plane only. (Stephens, ‘One Realist’ 2)

The one out of three score, the line break, and the fact that this is the conclusion of the review place the emphasis not on the praise but rather on the deficiencies of Baynton’s book. The reviewing of Franklin’s My Brilliant Career was also strongly gendered (Lamond, ‘Stella’). Reviewers almost universally read the novel through the lens of Henry Lawson’s preface, which ‘outs’ Franklin as ‘just a little bush girl’ (Franklin, Brilliant 281). These reviews engage in what Ellmann describes as ‘the skillful wrapping of a book, like a negligee, about an author’ (30), reiterating that Franklin is ‘just’ a young girl from the bush whose successful fiction is due to the rehashing of a particular set of personal experiences and not to do with craft or talent: the novel is described as ‘a document’ (‘Rev. My Brilliant Career’ 281) and ‘autobiographical’ (‘Recent Novels’ 4). The reviews in both The Bulletin and the London Times are explicit in their approval of that which can be ascribed to life and find fault with anything that might constitute art: ‘When the young lady leaves realism for romance we doubt her. [Franklin has] simply turned her girlish diary into a book; she has made literature out of the little things that lay around her’ (4). The trope of the diminutive ‘girl’ recurs in reviews of later works by Australian women writers. For example, praise for Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1928) in a review in The Bulletin is undercut by its description of the author: ‘dazzling book by a Sydney girl’ (Grover 2). Gina Mercer, writing in 1986, sees the stress laid on Helen Garner’s diminutive stature as a mechanism for keeping her literary status cut down to size. She notes that in reviews of Garner, … particular phrases recur almost ad nauseum. Garner and her writing (the two often seem to be synonymous) are repeatedly described as ‘modest,’ ‘slim’ … ‘minute,’ ‘miniaturist,’ ‘slender,’ ‘small,’ ‘meticulous’ and much to my relief, ‘still prey to the housewifely impulse.’ It seems that the media, whilst appearing to boost Garner, has in fact designated her as incontrovertably [sic] ‘small’ – in both physical and literary stature. (27) Mercer wonders why this ‘emphasis on Garner’s physical attributes has leaked over to become part of the assessment of her writing’ (27). The answer to Mercer’s question is that Garner is one of a long line of Australian women writers who have been reviewed this way. 135

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In Garner’s reception we see the same circumscription of achievements, infantilisation of the author and conflation of author and protagonist that we have seen in the reviewing of Australian women writers since the nineteenth century. For example, Peter Corris, in his review of Monkey Grip (1977) for The Australian, like the reviewer of Franklin’s work, accuses Garner of merely publishing her private journal, implying it is not therefore a ‘real’ novel. Ronald Conway in his review in Quadrant also laments Garner’s ‘inability to write a disciplined narrative which can detach itself sufficiently from self-revelation,’ and calls Monkey Grip ‘a shish kebab of skewered but barely connected episodes’ (77). We might for a moment think that the fact Garner herself has said that Monkey Grip is indeed ‘based on a diary and that’s why it’s got that rather broken up structure’ (qtd in Ellison 187) complicates matters. But then we remember that the autobiographical novel has a long and venerable history in literature and the likes of Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, and Gerald Murnane have not been pilloried for writing them. Dale Spender notes that women have cared about the reviews they have received and have written extensively about being victimised and discriminated against in them; the ‘literary history of women is so replete with protests about unjust reviews that the topic stands at the centre of women’s literary traditions’ (‘Reviewing’ 63). In her recently published journals, Garner expresses her frustration at the ways in which reviewers, female ones included, wish to rule in or out the subject matter that makes for great literature, even when they find the quality of the writing to be exceptional: A woman reviews my postcards book in Meanjin. Covers it with praise. ‘Artful.’ ‘This brilliant story.’ ‘Consistently good.’ ‘Outstanding.’ I’m glowing, defences down. Then on her way out she flicks me with her tail: ‘She is at her best, so far, when dealing with... middle-class, contemporary living and relationships. This is her great talent. It remains to be seen whether this is also her limitation.’ What do they WANT from me? (Garner 200; original emphasis) In our reading of reviews of Australian women writers, we have seen, again and again, this form of circumscribed praise that admires and yet stresses the limit point of a woman’s literary success. A common move involves denying women’s writing the ‘higher’ qualities of discrimination or intellectuality. The reviewer of two of Praed’s early novels in The Australasian acclaims her ‘freshness, originality, and power’ but finds her wanting in ‘taste, and experience, and judgement.’ Praed, the reviewer advises, needs to learn ‘where to stop’ and also how ‘to discriminate – which lady novelists so seldom do – between a gentleman and a cad’ (‘An Australian Novelist’ 8). Praed’s argument across her body of work, but especially in Policy and Passion (1881) and The Bond of Wedlock (1887) – that gentlemen are inherently cads – seems to have been lost on this reviewer. Franklin received reviews that placed similar limits on her capacity: Havelock Ellis, writing in the Paris-based Weekly Critical Review, praises the emotional force of My Brilliant Career but cautions that ‘something more than emotion is needed to make fine literature; and here we miss any genuine instinct of art or any mature power of thought’ (235). In the midst of an otherwise very positive review of My Brilliant Career, Stephens writes that it ‘is not a notable literary performance; but it is fresh, natural, sincere – and consequently charming’ (‘A Bookful’). We see men taking on the role of patriarch or pedagogue in reviews well into the twentieth century, telling women writers how they might improve themselves even while they offer praise. Sneja Gunew describes how Simon Patton, in a 2017 review in the Sydney Review of Books, gives Antigone Kefala, the author of 12 books, ‘advice on how to improve her poetry.’ Thea Astley, winner of four Miles Franklin Literary Awards, was also schooled in reviews. For example, Sidney Baker writes in his review of A Descant for Gossips (1960), ‘[w]ith discipline and a sense of direction, Miss Astley could go a long way’ (14).

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Australian women writers who were reviewed in the United States faced similar problems. Clifton Fadiman, book review editor at The New Yorker from 1933–1943 wrote of Stead: ‘Her humour is savage, her learning hard to cope with, her fancies too furious. Like Emily Brontë, she has none of the proper bearing, the reassuring countenance of a ‘lady author’ (‘Rev. The Man’ 104). He was a fan of her novels but his admiration had prelimits that were rooted in gender, such as when he notes that she is ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf ’ (‘Rev. The Beauties’ 69). Elsewhere, men writers are the unassailable yardstick by which Stead is measured: the female reviewer of For Love Alone (1944) at the New York Times admitted ‘Christina Stead does not have the stature of D.H. Lawrence, but she has many of his qualities’ (Page 12). It is instructive to contrast this with the praise given to the same novel from perhaps Australia’s greatest public literary critic, Nettie Palmer: ‘To read her book is to spend your time in the company of an exhilarating author, who is probably a genius … Whatever road she may take, we shall never be willing to lose sight of her’ (22). Palmer unabashedly uses the ‘g’ word – usually reserved only for men. This assessment – made some five years before the publication of The Man Who Loved Children – speaks to Palmer’s quality and confidence as a critic. Yet as Fiona Morrison has noted, it is the introductions by Randall Jarrell (1965) and Jonathan Franzen (2010) that have been understood as responsible for resuscitating Stead’s career and reputation. That Jarrell’s big call on Stead – ‘as plainly good as War and Peace and Crime and Punishment and Remembrance of Things Past are plainly great’ (qtd in Rowley 387) – is remembered and Palmer’s is not tells us something about Australia’s cultural cringe but also about the authority we have been willing to grant our women reviewers, even ones as prolific as Palmer. Spender says of the reviewing of women writers, ‘[i]n virtually any other context the behaviour of some reviewers would be quickly classified as sexual harassment’ (‘Reviewing’ 65). Reviews of Australia’s women authors evidence what Ellmann calls ‘an intellectual measuring of busts and hips’ (29). The Bulletin describes Sybylla Melvyn (or Franklin herself – it is hard to tell) as ‘neither unsexed nor over-sexed’ (Stephens, ‘A Bookful’), while the reviewer in The Times is preoccupied by a scene ‘at the bathing frolics, where, bye-the-bye, the young ladies “don’t bother about bathing dresses”’ (‘Recent Novels’ 4). Women writers are also subject to the moral policing of their writing about intimate relations. This tack is taken often in reviews of Praed’s novels, which were quite explicit for the period in regard to sex and violence. A review of Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893), for example, describes ‘the men and women kissing and hugging one another in that incontinent fashion familiar to Mrs Praed’s readers’ (‘Current Literature’ 4). Baynton poses similar challenges to reviewers with Bush Studies. The reviewer for the conservative British magazine Town and Country is appalled by Baynton’s frankness: ‘There is surely no need for realism to be revolting, and what possible use or beauty can there be in this unpleasant type of literature it is hard to imagine’ ( Junius 58). Baynton, Stephens writes, ‘stresses what may be called the predominantly obstetric quality of typical Bush life’ (Untitled 2). Stephens euphemises and thus whitewashes what is a frank and damning depiction of sexual violence in Baynton’s stories, especially in stories such as ‘Squeaker’s Mate’ and ‘The Chosen Vessel,’ which was famously cut and reframed when published in The Bulletin (Philadelphoff-Puren). More recently, reviews of Garner’s work also focus on its apparent salaciousness: Conway talks about ‘Ms Garner’s slightly porny pantings and de-pantings’ and says, ‘we are never far away from the glaring close-up of groin and armpit, bed and bored.’ He also accuses Nora of being ‘an oddly androgynous earth-mother heroine’ who ‘completely turn[s] off this middle-class square’ (77). In many of these reviews, we see a continuing confusion between protagonist and author expressed as a form of prurience and disgust. As Sheridan notes, ‘the notional opposition between the literary and the womanly’ situates women’s writing in the realm of the popular or judges it to be ‘incompatible with cultural

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sophistication and art’ (Nine Lives 176–177). Women writers who have enjoyed comparatively positive reviews have been judged to have closed this gap: Bronwen Levy, for example, suggests that Shirley Hazzard’s positive reception came down to the fact that her works were not, as Max Harris said of Transit of Venus, books ‘for the supermarkets.’ Levy wonders: … could it be that it is a hallmark of success for some (bourgeois) male reviewers if a novel by a woman is not intended for sale in the supermarket and thus escapes the tainted eyes of not only the masses but, more specifically, the female masses who make most purchases here? For the literary establishment, is the success of women writers measured by the male bourgeoisie being included among their readership? (‘Constructing the Woman Writer’ 189; original emphasis) She goes on to note that the few reviewers who critiqued Hazzard – such as Peter Pierce – did so on the grounds that her novels resembled so-called women’s genres. He writes that Transit of Venus ‘stylishly disguises its soap opera origins,’ and in another piece of faint praise, describes it as ‘the best-dressed women’s magazine fiction of its year’ (190). Elizabeth Jolley’s first novel Palomino (1980), which concerns a love affair between women, is described by Andrew Riemer in an essay for Westerly as ‘heavy-handed romanticism redolent of Mills and Boon and the television “soapie” industry’ (74). This is a writer who would go on to win the Miles Franklin in 1986 and the Age Book of the Year award three times. Reviews often betray assumptions about the expected or appropriate subject matter for writing by women. Sheridan describes Gwen Harwood’s reception in the following terms: ‘Most reviewers commented on her femaleness, and expressed some disquiet about the satires, as if the two were incompatible.’ She goes on to say that ‘[s]imilar assumptions about femininity being incompatible with cultural sophistication and art had greeted both Dobson’s poems about paintings and Wright’s philosophical themes’ (Nine Lives 176–177). A.D. Hope, for example, describes Rosemary Dobson’s In a Convex Mirror (1944) as ‘graceful, decorative’ poems which are ‘reflective, but her reflection gives rise to no original thought’ (25). Earlier, Tasma and Cambridge were criticised in Australian reviews for focussing on urban life and interpersonal relations while the philosophical ambitions of their novels remained unexamined, at least in Australia (Webby 71).What Michèle Le Dœuff describes as the ‘absolute exclusion of the feminine from the philosophical field’ (66) has been clearly in play both in how Australian women writers were received, and in how they experienced their reception as writers. Astley offered a vivid rendition of this context in an interview in 1986: I grew up in an era when women writers weren’t supposed to have any thoughts at all, and if they did express thoughts then either no attention was paid to them or they were considered brash and aggressive. I also grew up in an era where they talked about ‘women’s’ literature. ‘It’s a woman’s book,’ they’d say, as if there was something wrong with that. So when I was eighteen or nineteen I thought to myself that the only way one could have any sort of validity was to write as a male. It seemed to me that male writers were accepted, and what they said was debated and talked about, whereas women writers were ignored, or whatever women did was ignored … (qtd in Baker, Yacker 42; original emphasis) For women writers of colour or from migrant backgrounds the policing of appropriate subject matter is doubly compounded by what Gunew describes as ‘the default way that many Australian writers of non Anglo-Celtic background get treated by the gatekeepers of Australian literature.’ This constitutes a doubling-down on the conflation of women writers and their narrators/protagonists that sees an emphasis on ‘authenticity’ rather than skill; as Zora Simic puts it, ‘women’s writing as life transposed onto text (leaving “Art” to men)’ (‘Women’s Writing’). The attribution of the 138

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value of writers like Franklin, Baynton and Garner to their testimony rather than their artistry is even more evident in the reviewing of First Nations writers. Tom Inglis Moore, reviewing We Are Going (1964) in the Canberra Times, writes that Oodgeroo (then Kath Walker) ‘proved herself less than a poet in some weakness of form, yet also more than a poet in that she spoke as the authentic voice of the Aborigine.’ The patronising tone that we heard in the reviews of nineteenth-century women writers has been turned up to full volume: Although the expression is still naive at times, treading on the heels of doggerel, it has its own special flavour and appeal. On the whole, the sincerity of feeling gives the verse force and colour, and sometimes raises it to genuine poetry. (13) The faint praise with which Australian women writers have long been damned is compounded here by an assumption that the only value to be found in a work by a First Nations woman writer is in a ‘sincere’ representation of her own experience. This is the burden of representation playing out as a hard limit on attributions of the power and value of women writers perceived to be outside of the ‘mainstream’ (that is, who are not white). The reviewing of women’s writing does not only impact the woman who is the subject of the review: it becomes part of the context in which other women writers imagine their own work being received. In Garner’s Yellow Notebook she writes: A reviewer of women’s diaries from the late eighteenth century is surprised to find that they’re about family affairs and do not mention the French Revolution. I don’t find this at all surprising. But now that I’m sitting up in bed, pen in hand, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, all my stored-up treasures turn their backs and hide in the shrubbery. (47) In the later part of the twentieth century, Amanda Lohrey’s reception evidences the difficulties faced by a woman writer whose predominant concerns are politics and masculinity. By the 1980s, assumptions regarding the appropriate subject matter for women’s writing were less rigid, but second-wave feminism had in some ways reinforced earlier expectations that women’s writing focus on personal experience. Gillian Whitlock describes an interpretive community forming in the 1980s as receptive to a kind of writing that privileged the ‘shock of recognition’ when women’s lives were presented ‘intimately and naturalistically’ (xix). In her own reviews, Lohrey outlined what was expected of the ‘women’s book’: that it be ‘written within the conventions of psychological realism and focus...on a single female character of fine sensibility’ (‘Rhine Journey’ 94). Elsewhere she describes ‘the clearly recognisable genre of American women’s fiction – the biographical novel of the single heroic female self’ whose journeys to liberation take place ‘in a social and political vacuum’ (‘The Liberated Heroine’ 294, 298). In this context – one Lohrey was more than conscious of – reviewers had difficulty placing her early novels, which focus to a large extent on the experiences of men. Mark Thomas describes Lohrey’s ‘determination to write about the most exclusively male preserves in a man’s world’ in the following way: ‘Those sections of the novel seem like Kate Fitzpatrick’s commentaries at the cricket: the author is trying too hard to prove that she can make a point’ (16).3 This idea that men and their worlds are a no-go zone for women was disputed by Kylie Tennant when she reviewed Thea Astley’s The Well Dressed Explorer (1962). She argues that a woman is precisely the right person to be commenting on men because of the distance and lack of investment she has in the portrayal: Astley, she writes, … gives a woman’s view of the life of the Australian man. Sweeping over his small and feeble pretences like a crown-fire, exploding and crackling in a withering, twisting verbiage, and leaving a devastated area which was once a comfortable, philandering journalist. (509) 139

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In a 1986 interview, Astley explained her decision to write about men as a strategic one: I always felt they [men] wouldn’t read books written by women, because it would be like listening to a woman for three hours, which would be intolerable … So when I came to write, I thought, well … maybe there’ll be a chance of being read if I concentrate on the male characters in my book, or write as I did in The Acolyte, using a male character’s point of view rather than a female’s. (qtd in Ellison 56–57) As Lohrey’s reception shows, to write about men is not sufficient to prevent a writer from being reviewed as a woman, with all the assumptions that we discuss here in play. The 1980s saw a number of flashpoints around the question of women’s writing and the book review. There were debates at the time – and have been since – about how well represented women writers really were in the publishing scene in general. But it is very clear that there was a strong perception that the literary field was changing, and that this change was precipitated by second-wave feminism: Brian Matthews in the pages of Island in 1986 said it was ‘the dominant note in our literary culture’ (qtd in Whitlock xii). Jolley described the 1980s feminism as ‘a moment of glory’ for women writers, ‘a phase in the national literary history when women writers and readers have entered the mainstream’ (qtd in Whitlock xi). In 1989 a reviewer in the Australian Book Review could assert that the battle for equality was already won: ‘the days of rage and railing against the exclusion and neglect of women writers seem more to belong to the 1970s than to 1988’ (Treloar qtd in Cannold-McDonald 13). The 1970s to 1980s was a period of concerted interventions aiming to shift the gender balance of the literary field in Australia. It saw the publication of feminist polemics by Australian women writers including Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and Anne Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975). Important anthologies of Australian women’s writing appeared: in 1988 alone we count at least five of them (Burns and McNamara; Gunew and Mahyuddin; Couani and Gunew; Spender, Penguin Anthology). It also saw the rise of feminist journals such as Refractory Girl (1973), Hecate (1975), Scarlet Woman (1975), Womanspeak (1974), Australian Feminist Studies (1986), and Australian Women’s Book Review (1989). Major Australian literary journals were headed by female editors in this decade: there was, for instance, Judith Brett (1982–1987) and Jenny Lee (1987–1994) at Meanjin; Rosemary Wighton (1961–1971), Kerryn Goldsworthy (1986–1987), Louise Adler (1988–1989), Rosemary Sorensen (1989–1994) and Helen Daniel (1995–2000) at Australian Book Review; and Elizabeth Webby at Southerly (1987–1999). Feminist publishers McPhee Gribble (1975), Everywoman Press (1976), Sybylla Press (1976), Sisters Publishing (1979), and No Regrets Cooperative (1979) were founded in this decade. Mercer, writing in 1986, talks about an emerging ‘star system’ in which women writers such as Garner, Beverley Farmer, and Kate Grenville became ‘flavour of the month’ (26). Additionally, this period saw the rise of Women’s Studies in the academy, the inauguration of the National Women’s Studies Association, and a body of feminist reclamation projects in Australian literary studies including Kay Schaffer’s Women and the Bush (1988) and Sheridan’s Along the Faultlines (1995) (Simic, ‘Women’s Writing’). Reviews were the stage for live discussions around the relationship between ‘women’s novels’ and ‘feminist novels,’ and how a feminist critic should best position herself when reading and reviewing other women’s work. These issues came into focus when an essay called ‘Feminist Writings, Feminist Readings: Recent Australian Writing’ written by critic and then-academic Kerryn Goldsworthy appeared in the December 1985 issue of Meanjin. In this essay, Goldsworthy makes a distinction between recent works by women that engage with feminist politics and works that do not, arguing that in the mid-1980s a failure to acknowledge feminist ideas is untenable. According to Goldsworthy, contemporary women writers, unlike Stead and Tennant, 140

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… know what they’re doing: they are writing in the historical and sociological context of post-seventies feminism, where ideological ‘innocence’ is no longer a possibility. Within the context of that public and growing awareness of feminism it has become literally impossible for any writer, irrespective of his or her own ideological position, not to engage on one side or the other with the issues that it raises. (‘Feminist Writings’ 515) This essay elicited responses from the likes of Farmer and Cassandra Pybus, both accusing her of dogmatism: ‘feminism may be a “powerful political force,”’ writes Farmer in a letter to Meanjin, ‘but it’s not a dictatorship’ (142). At stake in these discussions about whether ‘women’s writing’ needed to advance a particular feminist agenda was a clash of two different aims when it came to feminist interventions into the literary sphere: the impulse to represent women’s experience where it had been silenced, and the desire to increase women’s access to the publishing field. The conflation of these aims compounded the tendency that has already been noted – to position women as speaking always and only to their own experience – and shaped a market and interpretive frame that was not always responsive to women writers whose work did not fit this description, or whose relationship to feminism as a movement was complex. It was only three months after the publication of Goldsworthy’s piece that the writer and critic Gerard Windsor, a guest of Writers’ Week at the 1986 Festival of Arts in Adelaide, stoked controversy by making some personal observations about gender discrimination in the local book reviewing field. This commentary was picked up with alacrity by The Bulletin before appearing as a forum in Island magazine in 1986. According to Windsor, women, not men, enjoy ‘some favoured status’ in the nation’s book pages, asserting that ‘the worst position for a writer to be in is that of being a middle-aged Anglo-Celtic male’ (16). This favoured status of women, Windsor writes, stems from the fact that more women than men read books and are ‘sex-conscious’ when they do so, largely because ‘[t]he intelligent, book-buying female reading public who have grown up with the women’s movement have been suffused with it’: ‘They want to see their own experience reflected.... What I would call Garner/Farmer territory – domestic pain – appeals to them immensely’ (16). Windsor explained that his concern had to do with the ‘group pressure’ the ‘intelligent, book-buying female reading public’ might place ‘on the professionalism of reviewing.’ He feared, in short, that they would ‘stymie the work of reviewing’ and create a ‘critical orthodoxy’ such that women writers become ‘sacred cows in the way that no male writer is’ (17). He argued that while men are subject to hatchet jobs, women’s reception tends towards the expository and the puff piece: ‘If a certain shield does surround women writers,’ Windsor went on, ‘I can’t quite believe it is because of unassailable quality … I dare to hypothesise that the atmosphere is encouraging and protective of women writers in a way that it is not of males’ (17). The piece concludes with not just women authors but women reviewers under attack: … male reviewers have a vivacity to their writing that women lack. This quality seems connected to the current flowering of that larrikin, sardonic, satirical, punstering, hyperbolic style of journalistic commentary that is entirely a male domain... The pallid female substitute seems to be... domestic whims[y]. (18) Island commissioned a series of responses to this piece, including work from Lohrey, Goldsworthy, Susan McKernan, Don Anderson and John Hanrahan. Goldsworthy sums up Windsor’s charge as ‘feminist mafia in power via gerrymander’ (‘Dense Clouds of Language’ 24) and notes that, even if it were true, … men have enjoyed ‘some favoured status,’ to put it mildly, in this and every other wedge or cone or whatever of the public sphere for hundreds and thousands of years... Would this 141

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tiny gesture to positive discrimination … really constitute so much as a drop in the bucket of equity? (25) In her response, Lohrey dismisses Windsor’s ‘concern about reverence for women writers,’ casting doubt that it exists at all and saying that even if it does it is because the likes of Jolley, Garner, and Farmer publish more frequently than most male writers. She also notes that she ‘can’t recall a single unsympathetic review of Tim Winton’ (‘The Dead Hand of Orthodoxy’ 21). Hanrahan writes: ‘I am only half convinced that women writers enjoy a privileged position,’ which of course meant he was only half convinced that Windsor was wrong. He notes that ‘[t]he other problem is that it is extremely difficult to get men to write about women writers, particularly if the book makes any claims to being feminist’ (23). This observation that men do not want to read or review women’s books has its echoes in Australia’s book reviewing culture pre- and post-1986. In 1923 the novelist and critic Vance Palmer – husband of Nettie Palmer – wrote in The Bulletin: A man wants vivid character, robust humour, a tough philosophy, and tragedy without a superfluity of tears. The atmosphere of women’s novels is not good for him: it is warm and enervating, like a small room heated with an asbestos stove. (3) Since 2016, the Stella Count has found that men do review men’s books more than they review women’s; in 2017 this differential was at a ratio of 5:2 (Harvey and Lamond, ‘2017 Stella Count Analysis’). Hanrahan’s supposition seems to be true in our review pages: women’s books are for women readers, and women as critics are held to be best placed to read them. This is a form of gender essentialism that seems much harder to shift than the notion that books by women warrant equal attention to those by men. Windsor’s assertion of women’s ‘favoured status’ in book reviews was described by Levy a year later as a ‘rearguard action’ (‘Qualitative Methods?’ 149). It is a trend observable beyond the book reviewing field that when women enter a particular sphere in larger numbers than usual it looks to those concerned like a hostile takeover, even when those actual numbers indicate women are still in the minority. Women’s response to this, and to the problem of accessing such spheres in the first place, has often been to create spaces of their own. The Australian Women’s Book Review was once such a space for book reviews, and was launched in 1989 partially, as Simic writes, ‘to provide a corrective to an ongoing gender disparity in mainstream book reviewing’ (‘Women’s Writing’). As Spender explains: ‘it seems that like women’s publishing, the only way to ensure that women’s work is fairly treated is by setting up women-controlled sources of review’ (‘Reviewing’ 83). The emphasis on specific spaces for the reading, publishing, and awarding of women’s books was to gain pace two decades later. In the 2010s feminist criticism and ideas were circulating in the popular media in ways perhaps unprecedented since the 1970s and 1980s. As Simic notes in her review of Clementine Ford’s bestselling Fight Like a Girl (2016), a new version of ‘first person feminism’ had emerged, culminating in the #MeToo movement (‘First Person Feminism’). The period also saw a new wave of feminist literary activity: the emergence of the Stella Prize, a women’s only literary prize that was established in response to repeated ‘sausage-fest’ shortlists in Australian literary awards, as well as a number of other interventions, including the Women of Letters literary salon (starting 2010). Australian Women’s Reading Challenge (2012), Rose Scott Women Writers’ Festival (2013), Women in Literary Arts Australia organisation (2015), Feminist Writers Festival (2016), Sisteria podcast (2016), and, most recently, the Broadside festival of new feminist ideas (2019). This period also saw a renewal of discussions about gender and the book reviewing field, both internationally with the VIDA Count and in Australia with the Stella Count. As Spender notes, book reviews are deeply important in developing and maintaining writers’ careers and livelihoods. And as we have 142

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argued elsewhere, reviews are also thoroughly imbricated with other value-endowing institutions such as literary prizes and academic study (Harvey and Lamond, ‘Literary Prizes’ 230). The spectre of gendered reviewing practices emerged again in a debate in the pages of the Sydney Review of Books in 2015. This concerned a composite review of three novels by Australian women writers Susan Johnson, Antonia Hayes, and Stephanie Bishop, by academic Beth Driscoll. The Sydney Review of Books is an online literary magazine that is housed at Western Sydney University but is in the style of the New York Review of Books or London Review of Books in that it deliberately blurs the distinctions between the review and the essay as well as scholarly writing and literary journalism. This essay sat even more uncomfortably across these faultlines because it focussed not on a close reading of the books themselves but on the paratextual questions of marketing and publicity, framing this discussion in relation to the notion of the ‘middlebrow,’ a term Driscoll argues in The New Literary Middlebrow (2014) is descriptive rather than pejorative. Hayes, Johnson and Bishop responded, together and individually, to Driscoll’s essay. First, they were rankled by the application of the term ‘middlebrow’ to their novels, noting that it remains one of derision in commonplace understandings, and even in the pages of the Sydney Review of Books itself; (Indyk) its readers, they contended, could not be expected to be across Driscoll’s recuperative work. This was a reaction Driscoll might have anticipated; in the introduction to The New Literary Middlebrow she notes that the word carries ‘a judgmental sting’ and ‘negative connotations’ and therefore ‘should be used with care’ (1). Second, Hayes, Johnson, and Bishop objected to being grouped together in a composite review. They had a point: as Spender puts it, ‘this practice of lumping women together as an undifferentiated mass or a specialty interest’ (86) has been noted since the 1980s by feminist scholarship here and overseas. The Stella Count has shown that, up until very recently, it has been men who hoard the long review space: a form of manspreading in our literary pages. Long reviews – a place where a writer can expect a sustained engagement with the content and form of their book of at least 1000 words – are gold in the Australian book reviewing field: our previous work has shown that even major Australian authors such as Richard Flanagan or Kim Scott can only expect between 8 and 11 reviews, only 2 or 3 of which might be long (Harvey and Lamond, ‘Literary Prizes’ 242–243). At the time of Driscoll’s essay, women’s cut of the long reviews was at 35%. What these women writers were lamenting was having their books judged by their covers, and on top of that having to share the rare spotlight in which that judging was taking place. These responses demonstrate the extent to which the book review continues to be a powerful force for attributing value to a literary work in Australia. It also points to the continuing vulnerability of books by women to associations with mass culture (Huyssen 44–62). As Hayes points out in her response, the simple fact of the title of her novel and its cover appearing next to the word ‘middlebrow’ on the landing page of the Sydney Review of Books is an act of mediation. Bishop, Hayes, and Johnson are acutely aware of something that academic critics sometimes forget or disavow: all writing about books is an act of cultural mediation and however careful our scholarly distance, we are doing a literary version of participant observation when those books are new. Here, as in most discussions of the gendered reception of women’s writing, two issues are at stake: the access that women writers have to the value-bestowing space of the book review, and the ways in which they are discussed when they get there. The campaign to document and improve access has been waged intermittently since the mid-1980s when Spender and Leslie Cannold-McDonald set out to quantify how gender bias was impacting the book reviewing and publishing sectors in Australia. Our data from 1985 and 2013 show that little had changed in the intervening period in terms of women’s access to the book review, sitting at a 60/40 ratio in both those years (Harvey and Lamond, ‘Taking the Measure’ 95, 102, 104). However, the counting that has accompanied the most recent surge of feminist literary activism has seen this begin to shift. Our work with the Stella Count – an annual count of gender, genre, and length across 12 major Australian review publications – has led to significant gains. It would appear that the act 143

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Figure 14.1 Overall representation of women authors in Australian review pages, 2012–2018

of counting, and the ability to publicise the results in the age of social media, has drawn the industry’s attention to the workings of gender bias in its periodical culture and inspired conscious change. In 2018, 49% of all reviews surveyed were of books written by women, up from 40% in 2014. In 2014, 3 of the 12 surveyed publications had reached parity in terms of their representation of women authors. By 2018, this had increased to 9 of the 12 (Figure 14.1). However, we do not know whether this change will be sustained. The book review remains an under-researched sector of the literary field, and the contribution of women reviewers – such Nettie Palmer, Dorothy Green, Thelma Forshaw, Marjorie Barnard, Rosemary Dobson, Nan McDonald, Mary Gilmore, Rosemary Wighton, Nancy Keesing, and Jill Hellyer, among others – remains an unwritten history of Australian literary criticism. Organisations such as the Stella Prize have work still to do in terms of thinking through how best to count the work of nonbinary and genderexpansive writers, and how to situate an understanding of intersectionality into the heart of their activism. One thing we do know, from the continuities across the reviewing of nineteenth century and much more recent Australian writers, is that no shifting of the ground can be taken for granted.

Notes

Works Cited ‘An Australian Novelist.’ Australasian 13 Aug. 1881: 8. ‘Australie.’ ‘Myths and Songs from the South Pacific.’ The Sydney Mail 9 Dec. 1876: 6. Baker, Candida. Yacker: Australian Writers Talk about their Work. Sydney, NSW: Picador, 1986. Baker, Sidney J. ‘Social Satire.’ Sydney Morning Herald 7 May 1960: 14. Bode, Katherine. A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2018. ———. ‘Appendix 6: 100-Topic Model Keywords.’ A World of Fiction: Appendixes. Katherine Bode. 2019. . Burns, Connie, and Marygai McNamara, ed. Eclipsed: Two Centuries of Australian Women’s Fiction. Sydney, NSW: Collins, 1988. Cannold-McDonald, Leslie. ‘The Women’s Decade? Getting Women Published in the ’80s.’ Australian Women’s Book Review 4.1 (1992): 13–15. Cantrell, Leon, ed. A.G. Stephens: Selected Writings. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1978.

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Women Writers and Book Reviewing Conway, Ronald. ‘Lost Generation.’ Quadrant 22.5 (1978): 77. Corris, Peter. ‘Misfits and Depressives in the Raw.’ Weekend Australian 6 Nov. 1977: 12. Couani, Anna, and Sneja Gunew, ed. Telling Ways: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing. Adelaide, SA: Australian Feminist Studies, 1988. ‘Current Literature.’ Argus 7 Apr. 1894: 4 Dixson, Miriam. The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia, 1788–1975. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1976. Driscoll, Beth. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2014. ———. ‘Could Not Put It Down.’ Sydney Review of Books 20 Oct. 2015. . Ellis, Havelock. ‘Fiction in the Australian Bush.’ Weekly Critical Review [Paris] 17 Sept. 1903. Kanga Creek: Havelock Ellis in Australia. Ed. Geoffrey Dutton. Sydney, NSW: Pan, 1989: 229–235. Ellison, Jennifer. Rooms of Their Own. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1986. Ellmann, Mary. Thinking about Women. London: Macmillan, 1968. Fadiman, Clifton. ‘Rev. The Beauties and Furies.’ New Yorker 25 Apr. 1936: 69. ———. ‘Rev. The Man Who Loved Children.’ New Yorker 19 Oct. 1940: 104, 106. Farmer, Beverley. ‘Letter to Judith Brett.’ Meanjin 45.1 (1986): 142. Franklin, Miles. My Brilliant Career. 1901. Peterborough: Broadview, 2008. Garner, Helen. The Yellow Notebook: Diaries, Volume I, 1978–1987. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2019. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. ‘Feminist Writings, Feminist Readings: Recent Australian Writing by Women.’ Meanjin 44.4 (1985): 506–515. ———. ‘Dense Clouds of Language.’ Island 27 (1986): 24–27. Grover, Montague. ‘The Red Page: His Books. The Week’s Best: Dazzling Book by a Sydney Girl.’ Bulletin 28 Nov. 1934: 2. Gunew, Sneja. ‘A Review of a Review.’ Sydney Review of Books 11 Jul. 2017. . Gunew, Sneja, and Jan Mahuddin, ed. Beyond the Echo: Multicultural Women’s Writing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988. Hanrahan, John. ‘Reviewing: Generosity, Timidity, Incest and All the Other Virtues.’ Island 27 (1986): 22–23. Harvey, Melinda, and Julieanne Lamond. ‘Taking the Measure of Gender Disparity in Australian Book Reviewing as a Field, 1985 and 2013.’ Australian Humanities Review 60 (2016): 84–107. . ———. ‘2017 Stella Count Analysis.’ The Stella Prize. 2018. . ———. ‘Literary Prizes and Book Reviews in Australia since 2014.’ Book Publishing in Australia: A Living Legacy. Ed. Millicent Weber and Aaron Mannion. Melbourne, VIC: Monash UP, 2019: 231–264. Hope, A.D. ‘Untitled.’ Poetry 17 (1945): 24–27. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Indyk, Ivor. ‘The Cult of the Middlebrow.’ Sydney Review of Books 4 Sept. 2015. Inglis Moore, Tom. ‘Aboriginal Poet Technique Has Matured.’ Canberra Times 17 Dec. 1966: 13. Johnson, Susan, Antonia Hayes, and Stephanie Bishop. ‘As One in Rejecting the Label “Middlebrow.”’ Sydney Review of Books 30 Oct. 2015. . Junius. ‘New Books.’ Town and Country Journal 21 Jan. 1903: 58. Lamond, Julieanne. ‘Stella vs Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia.’ Meanjin 70.2 (2011). . ———. ‘The Anglo-Australian: Between Colony and Metropolis in Rosa Praed’s The Right Honourable and Policy and Passion.’ Australian Literary Studies 27.1 (2012). . Levy, Bronwen. ‘Qualitative Methods? Reading Recent Australian Women’s Fiction.’ Hecate 13.2 (1987): 149–157. ———. ‘Constructing the Woman Writer: The Reviewing Reception of Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus.’ Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth-Century Australian Women’s Novels. Ed. Carole Ferrier. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1992. 179–199.

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Melinda Harvey and Julieanne Lamond Lohrey, Amanda. ‘The Liberated Heroine: New Varieties of Defeat?’ Meanjin 38.3 (1979): 294–304. ———. ‘“Rhine Journey” and the Political Unconscious.’ Meanjin 44.1 (1985): 94. ———. ‘The Dead Hand of Orthodoxy.’ Island 27 (1986): 19–21. Matthews, Brian. ‘Directions in Recent Fiction.’ Island 28 (1986): 39–43. Mercer, Gina. ‘Little Women: Helen Garner Sold by Weight.’ Australian Book Review 81 (1986): 26–28. Morris, Linda. ‘Closing the Gender Gap: Book Reviews Women Can Count On.’ Sydney Morning Herald 19 Sept. 2019. . Morrison, Fiona. ‘“A Vermeer in the Hayloft”: Christina Stead, Unjust Neglect and Transnational Improprieties of Place and Kind.’ Australian Literary Studies 31.6 (2016). . Observator. ‘To the Editor of the Sydney Gazette.’ Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 1 Apr. 1824: 2. ‘Our Anglo-Colonial Letter.’ Advertiser [Adelaide] 4 Dec. 1897: 5. Page, Ruth. ‘The Search for Love.’ New York Times 29 Oct. 1944: 12. Palmer, Nettie. ‘A Reader’s Notebook.’ All About Books 7.2 (1935): 22. Palmer, Vance. ‘Novels for Men.’ Bulletin 19 Apr. 1923: 3. Philadelphoff-Puren, Nina. ‘Reading Rape in Colonial Australia: Barbara Baynton’s “The Tramp,” The Bulletin and Cultural Criticism.’ JASAL spec. iss. (2010). . ‘Recent Novels.’ Times [London] 23 Aug. 1901: 4. ‘Rev. My Brilliant Career.’ Academy [London] 61 (1901). My Brilliant Career. Miles Franklin, ed. Bruce K. Martin. Peterborough: Broadview, 2008: 281–282. Riemer, AP. ‘Displaced Persons: Some Preoccupations in Elizabeth Jolley’s Fiction.’ Westerly 31.2 (1986): 64–79. Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead: A Biography. Port Melbourne, VIC: Heineman, 1993. Schaffer, Kay. Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition. Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge UP, 1988. Sheridan, Susan. Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, 1880s–1930s. St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1995. ———. Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making their Mark. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2011. Simic, Zora. ‘“Women’s Writing” and “Feminism”: A History of Intimacy and Estrangement.’ Outskirts 28 (2013). . ———. ‘First Person Feminism: Fight Like A Girl by Clementine Ford.’ Sydney Review of Books 12 Dec. 2016. . Spender, Dale. ed. The Penguin Anthology of Australian Women’s Writing. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1988. ———, ‘Reviewing: The Little Women Are Entitled To.’ The Writing or the Sex? Or Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good. New York: Pergamon, 1989: 60–92. Stephens, AG. ‘A Bookful of Sunlight.’ Bulletin 28 Sept. 1901: n.pag. ———. ‘One Realist and Another.’ Bulletin 14 Feb. 1903: 2. ———. Untitled. Bulletin 28 Feb. 1903: 2. Tennant, Kylie. ‘Fiction Chronicle.’ Meanjin Quarterly 21.4 (1962): 505–509. Thomas, Mark. ‘A Bold Examination of the Power Game: The Morality of Gentlemen.’ Canberra Times 29 Sept. 1984: 16. Treloar, Carol. ‘The Voice of Feminism.’ Australian Book Review 108 (1989): 26–27. Webby, Elizabeth. ‘Colonial Writers and Readers.’ The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge UP, 2000. 50–73. Whitlock, Gillian. Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1989. Windsor, Gerard. ‘Writers and Reviewers.’ Island 27 (1986): 15–18.

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15 LITERARY PRIZES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE Alexandra Dane

Literary prizes have been a consistent and highly visible consecratory institution in the Australian publishing field for more than half a century. Born out of the burgeoning professional and managerial classes in the early twentieth century, a social context that came with an increasing interest in non-financial signifiers of cultural and social power (English 74), literary prizes have long served as a shorthand for the nation’s understanding of what constitutes literary value. In this chapter, I argue that the cultural institution that is the contemporary literary prize operates as a trans-public agent that serves to increase the constituencies of particular authors and texts and, in turn, influence the perceptions and understandings of the characteristics of prize-winning authors and prize-winning titles both within and beyond literary publics. Drawing upon research into the role and function of literary prizes in the contemporary literary field and placing this research into conversation with conceptions of the publics and counterpublics, I contend that not only do literary prizes expose authors and texts to new publics but also that the literary prize is so successful at this cross-public pollination that is it is often used as an envoy by literary activists who wish to enact change both within and beyond the publishing industry. Analysis of the suite of programmes that make up the Stella Prize, Australia’s preeminent prize for women and non-binary writers, demonstrates the way that the contemporary literary prize exists in a dual temporality as a site of both literary consecration and literary activism. To understand the postdigital literary prize within the context of the Australian literary sphere, it is first important to unpack the function of the literary prize and the public belief in the literary prize as a consecratory institution. In her analysis of the contemporary literary middlebrow, Beth Driscoll explores the consecratory role of prizes and the way that prizes operate separately to the marketplace, observing non-commercial factors in order to judge the perceived merit of the text (The New Literary Middlebrow 119–120). Rather than the number of copies sold, the value of a title is, according to the collective belief of the literary prize judges (English 245), adjudicated with regard to a set of vague aesthetic criteria. The widely accepted position of the literary prize as an institution that identifies literary greatness is a theme that runs through much of the contemporary research into literary prize-giving culture. Examining the literature around the role of the prize reveals the extensive attention paid to their consecratory function: Beth Driscoll, Claire Squires, Marie-Pierre Pouly, Sharon Norris, and James English simultaneously extol the power of the prize in their role as ‘sober consecrators of genius’ (Driscoll, ‘Twitter, Literary Prizes and the Circulation of Capital’ 119–120) while pointing to the delicate system of beliefs and symbolic rewards that maintain the power of the prize to fulfil this role. Indeed, Driscoll observes that ‘literary prizes do not recognise works according to explicitly social or economic criteria: instead, elite literary 147

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values associated with the quality of the work’s prose and themes are generally deployed’ (120). In The Economy of Prestige, English describes this ‘collective belief ’ (127) in the cultural significance of the literary prize, recalling Pierre Bourdieu’s articulation of the ‘production of belief ’ (74, 78) in the power of individuals and institutions in the literary field. When a field of production, or, indeed, a public of discourse, believe in the cultural authority of an actor – authority that is based on a collectively agreed upon set of conventions – said actor has the clout to define the standard of value and proclaim the winners and the losers. Acknowledgement of the role that belief or faith in the prize plays in terms of a prize’s influence is not difficult to come by in literary prize scholarship. Wouter de Nooy notes that ‘the prestige of a prize is equivalent to the importance that members of the literary field attach to it’ (535) and English makes continual references to belief in the value of prizes and the illusio of literary practice throughout his work on the cultural prize. However, beyond belief in the prize itself, the influence of literary prizes both within and outside the parameters of the publishing industry is underpinned by a degree of faith. In a study of the winner of the Booker Prize, Graham Huggan observes that the work of literary prizes moves beyond just rewarding authors for their writerly achievements, and that the judges of major prizes, ‘stake a claim in the right to judge – to legitimise – that writer’s work’ (128). What Huggan describes is both the function of the prize and the continual establishment and reestablishment of the belief in both the prize and the judges’ ‘claim’ to authority. It is not simply the institution that rewards authors and texts with the label of prize-winner: the belief in the authority of prizes to identify one book as more worthy of attention than another is established and maintained by the individuals who interact with each prize. At the centre of this cycle of belief production are the judges who select the shortlisted titles and authors, and in the majority of cases select the winner. Many scholars of literary prizes (English, Driscoll, Squires, and Norris among them) adopt a Bourdieusian framework to understand the way that prizes function in the literary field. The structure of this framework is a useful tool for describing the circulation of power and influence within and beyond literary prizes and relies on a system of competitive position taking and the exchange of non-economic forms of capital. Moreover, the framework observes both institutions and individuals in the field in this exchange. When it comes to literary prizes, a significant proportion of their power, or belief in their power, comes from the perceived power of the judging panel, a product of their continued interactions with similarly powerful individuals such as authors or critics, and institutions such as publications, publishers, or universities. It is difficult to distinguish the power of the prize from the accumulated power of the judging panel, as they exist in a kind of symbiotic reliance for their perceived legitimacy; however, while it is the judges who define the notions of literary merit upon which their decision is made, the name of the prize itself is what lives on in the collective cultural memory, attached to the winning author and their title. Literary prize judges, under the aegis of the institution of the prize, help to define the constantly shifting understanding of prize-winning writing both within the industry and more broadly. The traditional and perhaps unsurprising outcome of this system of power is that access to the exposure and prestige that comes with winning a literary prize is unequal. One need only to look at the history of the major national and international Anglophone literary prizes to see the dominance of white male writers on the shortlists and lists of winners. When it comes to the Booker Prize, at the time of writing 65% of the winners are men, 35% women, and just 24% of the winners are authors of colour. In the Australian context, men constitute 70% of the winning authors, women make up 30% of the winners of Australia’s most coveted literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and there have been just four occasions in the history of the award where a First Nations author has won: Kim Scott in 2000 and 2011, Alexis Wright in 2007, and Melissa Lucashenko in 2019. The dominance of white male authors in the prize-giving space illustrates both the power of the prize as a definitional institution, and the way that this power acts in a self-fulfilling way: the dominant group define the parameters of literary value by awarding literary prizes to their peers, who, in turn, write in the vein of this definition. In an analysis 148

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of the dominance of white voices in Canadian literary awards, Kara Locke observes that ‘[t]here continues a cycle of white voices promoting white voices and proliferating stories from white perspectives’ (4). Similarly, in analysing the intersection between the Booker Prize, the judging panel and class, Norris notes that ‘[t]he organisers of the Booker remain committed to attracting a particular type of judge’ (148; original emphasis). While the perpetuation of this dominance is particularly problematic, it does demonstrate the influence that the prize has over the publishing industry and over discourse in other publics. While not always explicitly engaging with the theoretical framework of public spheres, much of the research into literary prizes cites the trans-public nature of the contemporary literary prize and attributes the enduring success of the prize to their translatable visibility as a media event. The power of a prize to influence reader tastes – as seen in the relationship between a title being shortlisted for or winning a major prize and a subsequent rise in sales – is one example of the way that a literary prize can contribute to the expanded constituencies of readers and commentators for an author or text, taking it beyond what Emmett Stinson calls the practice of ‘prosumption’ (29) that characterises the Australian literary field. However, it is more than just an increase in sales that demonstrates the trans-public nature of prizes. Driscoll describes the annual announcement of the winner of the Booker Prize as an ‘inherently provocative act’ that is ‘amplified through the global mass media’ (The New Literary Middlebrow 135), further demonstrating the role of the literary prize, in conjunction with the media, as a tool for the movement of literary discourse and literary products beyond the closely guarded bounds of the industry of authors, publishers, critics, and academics. Regarding the publishing and literary industries as a public of ‘discursive relations’ (Fraser 57), rather than a field, sheds light on the capacity for the prize to increase the number of constituents, and therefore, the structure of the public and counterpublics and, in turn, why literary activist interventions such as the Stella Prize select the prize itself as the tool for enacting change. Michael Warner’s description of publics can be neatly applied to what can be called the Australian literary public, and its associated counterpublics, and is an effective framework for analysing the way discourse evolves and power relations are enacted. The Australian literary public is self-organised and, at least in theory, members of this public are brought together through practice and participation rather than an externally prescribed label. Warner’s articulation of publics is a helpful tool for understanding the way a literary prize moves within and beyond the Australian literary public. Warner writes, ‘All discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterise the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting of that world a concrete and liveable shape, and attempting to realise that world through address’ (81). The literary prize is a type of discourse or performance that seeks to circulate, both within and outside the literary publics, often narrow ideas of literary value and definitions of prize-worthy writing. It is a particularly effective mode of performance. The cornucopia of Anglophone literary prizes is overrun by organisations that declare themselves the authority on identifying and awarding literary greatness. This can be seen in the way that individual prizes describe their purpose: the Booker Prize states that it is for ‘the best novel written in English’; the Miles Franklin Literary Award declares that it is awarded to ‘a novel which is of the highest literary merit’; and the National Book Awards ‘celebrate the best writing in America.’ These mission statements exemplify an archaic structure of a literary public where the dominant institutions stake a claim as the voices of the public and seek to identify and celebrate a hegemonic definition of the literary. The claim of authority taken up by institutions like the Miles Franklin Literary Award in Australia or the National Book Award in the United States has traversed beyond the literary publics, often through the reporting about literary prizes in the mass media (see Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow; English), where these hegemonic conceptions of good literature – conceptions that are often attached to a white male author – come to dominate university English course syllabuses, end of year ‘best books’ lists and influence the selection of judging panels of major awards. 149

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Considering the way literary prizes are able to expand the audiences for particular authors and texts and, simultaneously, influence dominant definitions of prize-winning writing, it is unsurprising that literary prizes have been adopted by various organisations as an activist intervention in response to the rigid dominant power structures that often characterise literary publics. Analysing the unequal access to power and discourse in various publics, Nancy Fraser observes that ‘unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles. The result is the development of powerful informal pressures that marginalize the contributions of members of subordinated groups both in everyday life contexts and in official public spheres’ (64). Reading Fraser’s observation against the conventional practice of mainstream contemporary literary prizes again reinforces the way that dominant notions of literary value are established by the dominant class, often through the awarding of literary prizes. Institutions such as the Stella Prize for women writers in Australia seek to address the structures that Fraser describes and challenge the Australian literary status quo. In this case, the literary prize is a vehicle for expanding the constituencies for the writing of Australian women and non-binary authors as well as changes to the discourse around gender and publishing within the Australian literary public and beyond. Established in 2013, the Stella Prize describes itself as ‘a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing, and an organisation that champions cultural change’ (‘About Us’). This description indicates an awareness of the power of the literary prize to spearhead change within and beyond literary public spheres and support the grassroots activities undertaken at the organisation. Observing the short history of the Stella Prize through the lens of the contemporary literary prize scholarship and the framework of publics and counterpublics set out by Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner, the public machinations of the organisation and the way the prize itself is utilised becomes clear. The origin story of the Stella Prize is one around which those seeking change to the gender dynamics of the Australian literary sphere can easily coalesce. While I have no intention of undermining the powerful mythology that surrounds the prize, it is a story that is easily promoted by journalists and media partners and speaks strongly to the values that the prize embodies. As the story goes, the Stella Prize was born out of a 2011 International Women’s Day panel discussion at Melbourne’s independent bookstore Readings. Conversations about the representation of women in the Australian publishing industry were particularly heightened at the time, following the shortlists for the 2009 and 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Awards that featured no women authors. The Stella Prize website outlines the early discussions for the prize, including conversations around the gender gap in book reviews in major Australian newspapers and magazines as well as the number of women being shortlisted for and winning major Australian literary awards (‘The Stella Prize Story’). The narrative of a group of women with prominent roles within the Australian publishing industry discussing gender on a panel at Readings bookstore in Carlton, followed by drinks and more conversation down the road at Markov is one that hits all the right beats: iconic independent bookstores and women conspiring over drinks on Drummond Street, all against the backdrop of another all-male prize shortlist and fresh statistics around the gender gap in book reviews and prizes from the United States and the United Kingdom. While an intriguing origin story has not traditionally been an essential element for the public success of a literary prize, in a crowded prize-giving field such as Australia’s a clear narrative that easily communicates a prize’s values is something upon on which arts journalists can hang their story. Arts reporting on the Stella Prize in newspapers like the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald reveals how important not only the statistics around representation of women among prize winners were to the narrative of the prize, but also the small group of women who established it. A 2011 article on the announcement of the prize by Gabriella Coslovich refers to the origin story – ‘Spurred on by the abysmally low showing of women on the literary prize circuit, an 11-strong group of Australian women, including author and senior editor Sophie Cunningham, have been working towards establishing the Stella since March’ – and goes on to cite the 2009 and 2011 all-male Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlists. When the first Stella Prize was awarded in 2013, the coverage of 150

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the award took a similar approach and reminded readers of the inspiration for the prize. Writing in the Age upon the announcement of the prize’s first longlist, Jason Steger reported that the women who set up the prize were ‘galvanised’ by the 2011 all-male Miles Franklin shortlist, the second of its kind in three years; and, reporting on the announcement of the 2013 Stella Prize shortlist, Susan Wyndham wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that the prize was ‘started by a group of women writers to counter a perceived male bias in awards and media coverage.’ Since it was first awarded in 2013, the Stella Prize longlist, shortlist and winner announcements have continued to be major events in the Australian literary calendar and attract a significant level of media attention. The arts media hold onto the origin story of the prize and, as a result, the mission of the prize as an activist intervention in the Australian literary sphere continues to be promoted within literary publics and beyond. The social media activity around and by the Stella Prize exemplifies the reach that the prize has beyond Australian literary publics. At the time of writing, the Stella Prize has more than 15,000 followers on Twitter, more than 4000 Instagram followers, and over 7000 Facebook likes. Moreover, there are 1000 posts on Instagram that carry #StellaPrize. This online engagement is perhaps emblematic of an excited counterpublic of women, who exist within and outside of the Australian literary public, who believe in the mission and vision of the prize, and therefore engage with the organisation online. Compared to a similar prize, the Miles Franklin, the Stella engages with a much larger group and appears to have much more response in return: at the time of writing the Miles Franklin Literary Award has over 5600 Twitter followers, more than 1600 followers on Instagram, and a little over 5000 likes on Facebook. Whereas literary prizes work to broaden the constituencies for individual authors and their texts and define the parameters of good writing, this brief survey of the Stella Prize’s social media metrics suggests that the Stella Prize as an institution has the ability to do this to a greater degree, while simultaneously working to address the underrepresentation of women in the most powerful corners of the industry. Stella, as an activist organisation, is more than a literary prize that celebrates and showcases the best of Australian women’s writing. This is evident in the way that Stella is structured as an organisation, and the way that the prize itself is framed, speaking to the power of literary prizes in the contemporary Australian publishing and the strengths and limitations of the literary prize as an entity that can bring about meaningful change. Among the aims of the prize listed on the Stella website, to ‘bring more readers to books by women and thus increase their sales’ and to ‘reward one writer with a $50 000 prize – money that buys a writer some measure of financial independence and thus time’ are values that are foregrounded (‘About Us’). The blatant promotion of ideals that speak directly to one of the primary challenges that women writers in Australia face – that is, financial and temporal precarity – is a radical act in the Australian literary prize sector. Prizes are more likely to lean on ideas of identifying and celebrating ‘the highest literary merit’ (Miles Franklin Literary Award), or ‘honour distinguished achievement’ (NSW Premier’s Literary Award Guidelines), rather than what a prize often means to a writer in real terms: promotion of their work and a one-off injection of financial support that can facilitate time to write. Beyond the prize, however, the organisation undertakes a number of activities that support the production and reception of women’s writing in Australia. Launched alongside the first Stella Prize in 2013, the Stella Count, much like the VIDA: Women in Literary Arts count in the United States, is an annual survey of major book reviewing publications – newspapers, literary journals, arts magazines – that aims to take stock of the gender reviewing gap in the Australian field (The Stella Prize, ‘The Count’). The Stella Count is a valuable tool for a number of agents working within and adjacent to the publishing industry and acts as a bellwether for the current state of gender and critical reception within Australian literary discourse. While the Stella Count did attract some media coverage when it was first launched (see Blanchard; Sullivan), the familiar story of the underrepresentation of women’s writing within the book review pages of the country’s major publications has struggled to consistently hold the broader public’s attention. Nevertheless, the count has continued each year, and fresh data on the 151

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relationship between gender and the nation’s literary discourse is released annually with the aim of keeping the publications accountable. The Stella Count exists as a continuation of number of feminist-led quantitative projects that aim to address the gender gap in book reviewing. In the 1980s a number of feminist literary activists in the United States and Britain began to count the number of reviews of titles written by women and reviews written by women in major publications. In 1987, Margaret Cooter and the Women in Publishing collective undertook an extensive study of American literary journals, newspaper review sections and periodicals and found that, especially where literary coverage in mainstream newspapers is concerned, there was a strong bias towards the reviewing of titles written by men. Perhaps more concerningly, the Women in Publishing collective consistently reported that the editors of the most biased publications either did not see a problem with this bias or refused to acknowledge its existence (89). American author Marilyn French collected data on this gender gap in the New York Times Book Review in the 1980s and found that, again, women authors were consistently underrepresented. After consulting with the editor about the discrepancy, French started a campaign with a group of women writers to increase their pitches to the Book Review (Spender 80–82). The results were positive: over a three-month period, the gap began to close. However, the campaign was difficult to sustain and before too long the status quo, in which men occupy the vast majority of space in the publication, was reinstated (Spender 83). The experiences of the Women in Publishing collective and French and her peers tells us that while quantitative analysis of the book review pages is an effective method for highlighting a well-understood bias, these examples show that without a longitudinal approach on the part of the campaigners, long-term change is difficult to enact. Fortunately, the Stella Count does not appear to be going anywhere and, each year, releases the result of the count in an effort to inspire book reviewing publications to take a more proactive, intersectional, gender-balanced approach to the commissioning of book reviews. Despite the fact that media attention for the annual count can be increasingly difficult to attract, the huge annual media spectacle that is the Stella Prize helps to usher the arguably less glamorous Stella Count into the consciousness of multiple publics. Here we can see the benefit of the prize at work. Literary prizes are events where a particular set of values are communicated and celebrated and Stella is using the literary prize – with a slick public relations campaign and $50 000 prize money – to support and continue more long-term and transformative work. The Stella Schools Program states that it ‘seeks to inspire and empower young people – girls and boys alike – to find their own creative voices, challenge stereotypes and imagine a future not limited by their gender.’ Taking a ground up approach, the programme involves a number of events that aim to challenge and transform the gender representations in the Australian literary public and publishing industry. Stella Schools Programs include writers’ festivals, workshops, speaker events, professional development opportunities and are accompanied by extensive resources for students and educators. This extensive programme of events targeted towards school-aged children is in some ways a far cry from the Prize but together they work in concert towards a common goal. Just like the Stella Count, the Schools Program does not appear to attract significant media attention. This does not appear to be a problem for the work the Schools Program is doing, work that has attracted funding from the Australia Council, the Australian Communications Foundation, and the Nelson Meers Foundation (The Stella Prize ‘Stella Schools Program’). Where the Stella Prize works to consistently keep the issue of gender in the publishing industry in the arts media cycle, and play an influential role in the transformation of attitudes around gender and prize-winning writing, the Stella Count and the Stella Schools Program are able to work on the ground, influencing change at multiple levels. The Schools Program and the Count are initiatives that showcase how a literary prize can be utilised, as a trans-public event, to expand the publics not only for women’s writing, but also for the initiatives that will bring about long-term change. By establishing a literary activist organisation that is spearheaded by a wealthy and highly public literary prize, Stella demonstrates the trans-public influence of literary prizes on literary discourse 152

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and perceptions and understandings of prize-winning writing. While, as with all literary prizes, the decision of literary prize judges has a trickle-down influence over the production of literary works, the real transformative action within literary publics comes from grassroots activities like the Stella Schools Program. Initiatives like the Stella Schools Program and the Stella Count need the multi-public literary prize, and the publicity and engagement it attracts, in order to survive. The Stella Prize functions at multiple levels for women authors in Australia and their broader reading publics. For women authors, there is the opportunity of winning significant prize money and the publicity that comes with being shortlisted for or winning a major prize. For the reading public at large, there is a heightened awareness of the gender prize gap and the issues around the relationship between gender and perceptions of what constitutes ‘good writing,’ as well as guidance on what to read as prescribed by powerful cultural intermediaries. Herein lies the collective belief in the power of the literary prize. All literary prizes operate across these multiple publics, publics that have diverse interests, which is why they are such powerful agents within and beyond the publishing industry. The Stella Prize recognises and harnesses this power and, with a very clearly articulated agenda, seeks to use it to reconfigure the structure of Australian publishing.

Works Cited Blanchard, Bethanie. ‘The Stella Count: Why Do Male Authors Still Dominate Book Reviews?’ Guardian 26 Sept. 2013. . Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York, Columbia UP, 1999. Cooter, Margaret, et al. Reviewing the Reviews: A Woman’s Place on the Page. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1987. Coslovich, Gabriella. ‘Female-Only Literary Prize Puts Gender on the Agenda.’ Sydney Morning Herald 29 Aug. 2011. . De Nooy, Wouter. ‘Gentlemen of the Jury … The Features of Experts Awarding Literary Prizes.’ Poetics 17 (1988): 531–535. Driscoll, Beth. ‘Twitter, Literary Prizes and the Circulation of Capital.’ By the Book: Contemporary Publishing in Australia. Ed. Emmett Stinson. Melbourne, VIC: Monash UP, 2013. 103–119. ———. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemaking and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.’ Social Text 26 (1990): 56–80. Huggan, Graham. ‘Prizing “Otherness”: A Short History of the Booker.’ Studies in the Novel 29.3 (1997): 412–427. Lamond, Julieanne. ‘Stella versus Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia.’ Meanjin 70.3 (2011). . Locke, Kara. ‘White Voices: The Dominance of White Authors in Canadian Literary Awards.’ The Structure of the Book Publishing Industry in Canada 371 (2017): 1–9. Miles Franklin Literary Award. ‘About the Award.’ Nd. . National Book Awards. ‘National Book Awards.’ Nd. . Norris, Sharon. ‘The Booker Prize: A Bourdieusian Perspective.’ Journal for Cultural Research 10.2 (2016): 139–158. NSW Premier’s Literary Award Guidelines 2019. Nd. . Pouly, Marie-Pierre. ‘Playing Both Sides of the Field: The Anatomy of a “Quality” Bestseller.’ Poetics 59 (2016): 20–34. Spender, Dale. Is it the Writing or the Sex? Or, Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good. Oxford: Pergamon, 1989. Squires, Claire. ‘Literary Prizes and Awards.’ A Companion to Creative Writing. Ed. Graeme Harper. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 291–303.

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Alexandra Dane Steger, Jason. ‘Stella Prize Longlist Ranges Far and Wide.’ Age 21 Feb. 2013. . Stinson, Emmett. ‘Small Publishers and the Emerging Network of Australian Literary Prosumption.’ Australian Humanities Review 59 (2016): 29–43. Sullivan, Jane. ‘The Gender Question Raises its Cultural Head, Again.’ Sydney Morning Herald 3 Oct. 2014. . The Man Booker Prize. ‘The Man Booker Prize.’ Nd. . The Stella Prize. ‘About Us.’ Nd. . ———. ‘The Count.’ Nd. . ———. ‘Stella Schools Program.’ Nd. . ———. ‘The Stella Prize Story.’ Nd. . Warner, Michael. ‘Publics and Counterpublics.’ Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49–90. Wyndham, Susan. ‘Stellar Shortlist for New Women’s Book Prize.’ Sydney Morning Herald 20 Mar. 2013. .

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16 LITERARY MEDIA ENTERTAINMENT Author Stardom and the Public (Media)Sphere Della Robinson Since the 1970s, the relationship between literary authorship and media entertainment has become much closer. As a result, the phenomenon of literary celebrity can be seen as a form of entertainment, validating it as a part of the postmodern literary experience. An example of this took place in June 2009, when over 1,000 people queued outside Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre waiting for their idol to arrive: the elderly, softly spoken, grey-haired novelist, J.M. Coetzee. At this event, it was surprising for those in the audience to see ‘how much of a showman Coetzee emerged as when reading his own work, inserting moments of broad comedy into his performance that had the audience rocking with laughter’ (‘JM Coetzee Makes a Rare UK Appearance’). A further instance of a literary celebrity’s ‘star’ treatment occurred at the Viennese press conference for Schindler’s List (1993). Thomas Keneally recalls the events that immediately ensued when he, with Steven Spielberg, tried to leave the stage: A stampede of press, uncharacteristic of Austrians, came pressing forward seeking further interviews … so we escaped by a door, down staff corridors and offices and through more kitchens, until we arrived in a laneway behind the Sacher [hotel], where three Mercedes and a number of other vehicles waited for us to make up a convoy. We were hustled into the Mercedes and whisked away at a great pace. (287) In the postmodern era authors are increasingly visible in the ‘mediasphere,’ a term used to describe the collective ecology of the world’s media, so that now authors have the opportunity to be seen and heard on television, podcasts, webcasts, YouTube, blogs and vlogs, databases, webpages, the live streaming of festivals, Twitter, and numerous other digital media platforms, so that to be a successful author today one must become a ‘mediagenic,’ meaning, the Oxford English Dictionary has it: ‘of a person, subject, etc.: popular with the mass media or their audiences, media-friendly; creating a favourable impression when presented in the media.’ The intense focus aimed at local celebrity authors can be accredited to the shift of Australian literature from its national imperative towards a globally orientated commodity, making use of celebrity as an effective marketing tool in the promotion of authors. As Mark Davis points out, the literary paradigm had never been profitable in Australia and did not have the ability to sustain itself commercially. Rather, it was held afloat by ‘cultural nationalism, communities of enthusiasts, the education system, and government funding’ (130). Hence, the mass media’s expansion and involvement in the reception of literature which originated in the publishing mergers of the 1960s and 1970s, and proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, contributed to the publishing industry’s absorption ‘into a global entertainment and 155

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information industry under the control of a handful of large conglomerates’ (Moran 324). This economic phenomenon raises certain questions surrounding the notion of contemporary authorship: how is contemporary literary celebrity in Australia articulated through literary media entertainment? How can the star personas of literary celebrities be interpreted in the mediasphere? Can the thematic content of a writer’s work further assist in the creation of celebrity? This chapter investigates these questions and other lines of enquiry which arise when literary celebrity is produced, disseminated, and maintained through literary media entertainment.

Entertainment and its Shifting Cultural Paradigms In an attempt to address the often-negative cultural connotations surrounding the concept of entertainment and its relation to art, it is worth considering why certain forms of entertainment, such as popular art and mass culture should be given more credibility and not simply dismissed as modes of hedonistic distraction. In ‘Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics,’ Richard Shusterman points out that ‘the popular entertainments of one culture (such as Greek or Elizabethan drama) often become the high art classics of a subsequent age’ and reminds us that the novels by the Brontë sisters and Charles Dickens were initially received as light popular fiction, not as the masterpieces of great literature we regard them today (292). Lawrence Levine, in his widely read Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988), further explicates the division between high art and popular art, arguing that during the eighteenth century fractures began to appear in the unrestricted appreciation of art as cultural elites worked at effecting a separation of their cultural consumption, which, in turn, assisted in bringing about the dichotomy of art and entertainment (176–177). Adding further weight to the appreciation of entertainment in association with the literary, David Shumway suggests that ‘[c]ultural productions derive their meaning from the judgments of pleasure and value that audiences make of them’ (115), and states that …if you want to understand the longevity of art, its entertainment value is among the most important factors. So, if we want to know why people have read Homer and Shakespeare over the years, the place to start is with the guess that their works have tended to yield pleasurable experiences. (116) More recently, in 2017 Christy Collis declared that there was still a distinct lack of research surrounding entertainment, explaining that ‘entertainment is not an obscure term for a niche genre. It is a multi-billion dollar global industry with whose products a significant portion of the world’s population engages deeply and regularly’ (11). Furthermore, ‘[w]ithin academia, entertainment has not been a key organising concept within the humanities, despite the fact that it is one of the central categories used by producers and consumers of culture’ (McKee et al. 108). There does appear to be a contextual shift in the mediasphere which is gradually becoming more attentive to the word ‘entertainment.’ For instance, if one conducts a digital search for the category of ‘books’ in online newspapers, this section is often placed under the category of ‘entertainment.’ Listed below are a number of Australian Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and their classificatory configurations: https://thewest.com.au/entertainment/books https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/books https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books https://www.smh.com.au › entertainment › books https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/entertainment/books 156

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The above newspaper web addresses show that the specific location of ‘books’ is to be accessed via each website’s entertainment section. File pathways such as these form part of everyday micronarratives in the mediasphere and clearly point to a general increase in the acceptability of the term ‘entertainment’ in association with books. Other examples of the influence of entertainment in the literary arena include writers’ festivals, televised literary prize events, the adaptation of novels for television miniseries, televised book groups, and so on. The success of television book clubs demonstrates that publishing houses recognise the essential element of entertainment in the promotion of their authors’ publications. Adding to this, Michael Wolf affirms that due to ‘increased and more aggressive competition, businesses will need to incorporate entertainment into their products and services in order to standout in the marketplace’ (79). A similar observation on the omnipresence of entertainment is encountered in Neal Gabler’s Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (1998). Gabler argues that through a transformation of technology and collective psychology, entertainment has become the most essential of human ‘values’ in North America, and as such its effective reality. He labels the phenomenon the ‘Republic of Entertainment’ (31). This line of reasoning then makes it imperative for authors to ‘perform’ and entertain in the mediasphere, thus gaining maximum visibility for themselves and their work.

Literary Media Entertainment and Authorial Performativity The concept of performativity refers to the construction of identities and how these are produced by actions, behaviours, and gestures. Joseph A. Boone and Nancy J. Vickers consider ‘a primary route – perhaps the primary route – for literary trained scholars interested in celebrity lies directly through the related disciplines of performance studies and theatre history’ (907). Today, an author’s performed identity is observed and emphasised predominantly in the mediasphere, which has implications for the author’s star persona and ‘veridical’ self (Rojek, Celebrity 9–12). The celebrity author’s star persona is a living, acting character (social mask) employed in the construction of an identity. But exactly how is one able to investigate an individual celebrity’s star persona? What is needed is a framework for the micro aspects of an author’s star persona, one that is capable of examining the differences between the ‘I’ (the veridical self ) and the ‘Me’ (the self as seen by others – the star persona). For this, I propose a methodology that ‘deconstructs’ the conventional characterisation profile, notably by examining the star persona’s character traits within a framework of ‘SAAO’: the combination of Speech, Action, Appearance, Others. By applying these four fundamental elements constitutive of the study of characterisation, its operational framework then becomes an essential tool for analysing the performative identity of a celebrity author’s star persona. I apply this framework to an analysis of Keneally’s star persona. As Peter Pierce points out, ‘[b]esides being one of its most popular authors, Keneally is among the most publicly recognisable figures in Australia.’ In accordance with the SAAO framework, one now has to look at the representations contained in Keneally’s speech, his actions, his appearance, and what others say of him, as a way of investigating his star persona in the mediasphere.

Speech In numerous interviews and public appearances Keneally states that he is still perplexed at receiving so much national and international attention, declaring that, ‘I’m just a klutz from Homebush’ (qtd in Robinson). Furthermore, when interviewed by Victoria Laurie in 2015, Keneally relayed a story of when Richard Flanagan described him as ‘part wombat, part goblin with a crystal meth cackle,’ to which Keneally wholeheartedly agreed, saying, ‘[o]h it’s the truth. I can put the remaining tufts of my hair up at the side, put a spoon over my nose and you’ll see I make a perfect wombat.’ This self-parodying, self-deprecating speech works in a psychological manner to 157

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position Keneally on the same social and cultural level as his general audience, thus representing himself as an ordinary, everyday person. Yet, as the extract below demonstrates, he is equally at ease articulating on significant political matters: VICTORIA LAURIE: Why don’t you like the term Team Australia, used by Prime Minister Tony

Abbott to encourage inclusivity? THOMAS KENEALLY: I think it’s a formula for division. It is not a proposition that comes out of

a desire for inclusion but to chide people into line. VL: Is Australia in a better shape than the politicians say? TK: Yes, they’d rather divide and rule than admit it. We’re made to believe that the aged and

young in Australia are locked in a war for resources. But the Intergenerational Report said people would be as prosperous in 2050 as they are now. VL: You’re a staunch republican, but when will it happen? TK: We’ll need to address Aboriginal recognition first. If we become a republic before I die, I’ll be a very happy old bastard. As the final word above suggests, a further aspect of Keneally’s ‘everyday person’ discourse is his use of expletives. Australia has a reputation for robust language (Taylor 23) and Keneally’s use of such certainly works to align him with audiences. He often calls himself ‘an old bastard’ and his writing is also styled for the ‘average reader,’ in that he writes in a language that is not too semantically dense, thus again representing himself as a writer who is an ‘ordinary’ bloke. Another important point in relation to Keneally’s star persona is that he has never spoken about or described his writing as being mystically transcendental in the Romantic sense, as this would counteract his ‘ordinary’ persona. However, Keneally does, like many other celebrity authors, have a repertoire he draws on to assist in constructing his authorial persona. In interviews, many of which feature on YouTube, he conveys his one-liners, which are either about growing up in Homebush in Sydney’s (then-poor) western suburb district, his family, his foibles, and so on, so that these articulations then become the narrative that surrounds his celebrity persona.

Actions Keneally’s actions in the mediasphere represent him as a humanitarian author in pursuit of democratic platforms for the marginalised. Politically charged issues, such as the pursuit of protection for asylum seekers and ending the ill treatment of refugees denote him as a literary activist. Apart from visiting the Baxter Detention Centre in South Australia, Keneally has coedited two anthologies with Rosie Scott on the writings of refugees. The second collection, Another Country (2004), includes a copy of the letter Keneally sent to Senator Amanda Vanstone, then-Minister for Immigration. Among other appeals, the letter requested that ‘more genuinely liberal democratic means be sought to protect our sovereignty, without sacrificing the beliefs in human dignity’ (118–119). Keneally’s literary activism is not his only preoccupation, as he also gives much of his time to, and is a patron of, numerous charitable concerns: The Fred Hollows Foundation, Schizophrenia Research Institute, Cerebral Palsy Alliance, Asthma Australia, and ASCA (Adults Surviving Child Abuse), among others. In studies of celebrity, the neologism for philanthropic capital is ‘celanthropy’ and it is noteworthy that ‘the PR-Media hub supports celanthropy … [as it] builds the celebrity brand by demonstrating that the star has a good heart, a commitment to activism and a social conscience’ (Rojek, Fame Attack 69–71). Thus, a combination of Keneally’s celanthropy, literary activism, ambassadorships, and his association with the Australian Republican Movement – remembering he was their first chairman – maintains for him a national presence in the mediasphere, which, in turn, bolsters his authorial celebrity. 158

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Appearance The attire of a celebrity is often analysed for its symbolic codes. For instance, particular shirts or hats can act as a representation of geographical specificities, often working to reinforce the visual attention surrounding the celebrity. In the case of Keneally, his appearance assumes a casual air when wearing a Manly Sea Eagles rugby league shirt. This particular sporting gear holds no significance for audiences in other parts of the world; however, it is immediately recognisable to local Sydneysiders. There are also many images of him wearing an Akubra hat, effectively generating representations of the landscape of outback Australia and conveying traditional paradigms of Australian identity. Apart from being voted a National Living Treasure (1997), Keneally is known as a ‘man of the people,’ and a writer who for over 50 years has been a prominent voice in the national conversation. However, numerous images of Keneally also feature him sporting a flat tartan cap (cheese-cutter hat). This style of flat cap is worn by thousands of people in many different countries, and so its international semiotic dress code assists to formulate Keneally as a ‘familiar’ person.

Others The final element of the ‘SAAO’ persona framework is ‘Others,’ which denotes what other people say about the author, as critical censure as well as acclaim gains attention and is indispensable in furthering an author’s presence in the mediasphere. Keneally, apart from holding a special place in literary history as Australia’s first-ever winner of a Booker Prize, is generally described as a philanthropic humanitarian who gives generously of his time. Flanagan maintains that: Patrick White was gentry who did not need money to write. In Tom Keneally, we have the first professional literary writer in our history who sustained himself for a lifetime from his writings. This was a new thing, and no small thing, and in the stories encapsulated he related something so much bigger: the rise of a new, confident Australian culture. Furthermore, Flanagan as the younger writer, and who has known Keneally for many years, makes known his gratitude to Keneally by stating that, [h]e opened the space for me and for so many other Australian writers to follow. He showed all that was possible, he demonstrated the connection between the writing and the readers and the life, and he was kind to so many writers, me included. (qtd in Morris) But what have others said of Keneally after meeting him for the first time? James Walton, a journalist for the Telegraph newspaper, clearly depicts Keneally as good-natured celebrity author: Thomas Keneally is a famously genial interviewee – courteous, self-deprecating and with a chuckle Sid James might have envied for its earthiness … At one point, he becomes the only writer I’ve ever interviewed who shows me pictures of his grandchildren … And yet, you have to keep reminding yourself, this is one of the world’s most distinguished authors … And with that, the least grand of grand writers thanks me warmly for my time and goes off to be just as unfailingly charming to the photographer. The ‘SAAO’ framework thus assists as a methodology for investigating and reporting on performative actions and celebrity persona. In Keneally’s case, his star persona (the self as seen by others) is signified by his working-class rags-to-riches narrative as propagated through ‘achieved celebrity’ (Rojek, Celebrity 121), his literary activism, celanthropy, and charismatic performative qualities. 159

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Authorial Persona and Implicit Promotion in the Mediasphere After Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), the BBC filmed a documentary about the writer’s life and works, entitled ‘Imagine … Richard Flanagan: Life after Death.’ In the first few minutes of the documentary, the footage shows Flanagan receiving his Booker Prize from the Duchess of Cornwall and then moving forward to the podium to give his acceptance speech. Like Keneally, his speech distils his star persona through a rags-to-riches narrative: I do not come out of a literary tradition. I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate, and I never expected to stand here before you in this grand hall in London, as a writer being so honoured. (Cocker) This narrative no doubt helped Flanagan to generate an empathic affective response from the audience, which, in turn, assists to maintain and increase one’s celebrity status. Robert van Krieken points out that it is possible to advance the trajectory of an individual’s celebrity status ‘if they have a distinctive narrative, allowing themselves to be subjected to constant scrutiny and a demand for perpetual performance, encompassing their private life and personality as well as their public roles’ (10). A further example of this, which amounted to enormous publicity for the author, was Flanagan’s appearance on television programme Australian Story. The episode, ‘A Letter from Richard Flanagan,’ featured the author talking about his writing, showed archival footage of his campaigning to protect the Tasmanian forests, and footage of him working together with Baz Luhrmann on the film Australia (2008). In the first two minutes, Flanagan is introduced by a number of people known to him, thus constructing for viewers an overview of the subjectivity of the Australian writer cum literary celebrity: GEOFFREY DYER: He doesn’t fear government. He doesn’t fear big business. He doesn’t fear the

people who hold power. NIKKI CHRISTER: He doesn’t realise the impact that his words can have. I don’t think he thinks

he’s that powerful. But he is. BAZ LUHRMANN: Richard Flanagan is probably best described as the Ernest Hemingway of

Australia. You know, on the one hand he’s this immense intellect, and on the other he’s this extremely adventurous outdoors man of a man. The programme weaves from camera shots of the Tasmanian countryside to footage of Flanagan in a canoe paddling along a river. It includes a number of scenes of loud and colourful eco-political rallies that show Flanagan on stage speaking through a megaphone, which are juxtaposed with quieter scenes of him at home with his family. The content of the programme adhered to Australian Story’s conventions of exploring ‘modern life, featuring profiles of ordinary and extraordinary Australians … lucidly told through engaging images and a compelling narrative’ (‘Australian Story Series 22’). The producers state that the programme values the subjective and that it operates through case studies in the confessional mode, but that it steers clear of an on-screen interview. This then makes it ‘a favoured site, especially for those already in the public gaze, for the revelation of matters which could be considered private, but which have been chosen by the subjects themselves to be made public’ (Bonner and McKay 645). In the episode featuring Flanagan, the programme not only becomes an endorsement of Flanagan’s author persona, but also assists to promote other people, places and events. Andrew Wernick, speaking on the vast discourse constituted by promotion as a whole, maintains that as soon as the ‘imaged name’ obtains visibility in the public sphere, the celebrity represents and becomes ‘a banked and transferable store of promotional 160

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capital’ (qtd in Moran 337). As such, the content of ‘A Letter from Richard Flanagan’ then assists to promote Jo Camelerie’s music, Dyer’s paintings, Luhrmann’s films, Christer’s publishing house (Penguin Random House), the Australian newspaper, and Flanagan’s favourite bar/hotel, among various other entities on which the camera focusses. The promotional capital contained in this episode is thus generally of an implicit nature; however, Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (1991) offers an example of the way in which the borders of aesthetic appreciation and promotional capital can be blurred.

The Promotional Capital of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet The convergence of the literary arena with media entertainment is evident in Winton’s Cloudstreet. The text has a cross-platform structure as it is a canonical literary novel, stage drama, radio play, opera, and appeared as a television miniseries on the Showcase network (now Fox Showcase). It is also noteworthy that what separates Cloudstreet from other literary media entertainment is its explicit promotional capital through corporate advertising and sponsorship from Lexus, the luxury car company. In one particular online advertisement, the literary and media entertainment arenas openly converge with the design of a ‘collaborative’ image showing the protagonist (‘Fish’) hovering spread-eagled in mid-air over the Swan River, and located beneath him, almost floating on the waterline, in large, capital letters are the words: ‘LEXUS TAKES A DRIVE DOWN CLOUDSTREET.’ The content of this advertisement amplifies Wernick’s hypothesis that promotional culture dissolves the boundary between promotion and the wider world of expressive communication (268). Similarly, Simone Murray maintains that ‘books constitute only one of a number of potential media forms in which creative content can be embodied and through which authorial celebrity can continue to circulate publicly and replicate ad infinitum’ (36). This chapter explored how it will increasingly become imperative for the literary arena to share in the ‘flow of content’ in a mediatised public sphere, and as such, situate itself as part of the new paradigm of literary media entertainment. In 2017, ‘no local literary fiction titles reached the top bestseller list’ even though ‘several Miles Franklin-winning authors and Man Booker prize-winner Richard Flanagan all released books’ (Sullivan 2018). As such, the star personas of literary celebrities, their authorial performances, literary/eco-political activism, and their other extra-literary pursuits need more media attention and reportage, so that across the ‘Republic of Entertainment’ Australian literature can continue to enjoy the attention it deserves and maintain for itself a sustainable presence in a media and audience-centric twenty-first century.

Works Cited ‘A Letter from Richard Flanagan.’ Australian Story. ABC. 3 Nov. 2008. ‘Australian Story Series 22.’ Screen Australia. Nd. . Bonner, Frances, and Susan McKay. ‘Personalising Current Affairs without Becoming Tabloid: The Case of Australian Story.’ Journalism 8.6 (2007): 640–656. Boone, Joseph A., and Nancy J. Vickers. ‘Introduction – Celebrity Rites.’ PMLA 126.4 (2011): 900–911. Cocker, Jack. ‘Imagine … Richard Flanagan: Life after Death.’ Vimeo 7 Aug. 2015. . Collins, Jim. Bring on the Books for Everybody. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Collis, Christy. ‘What is Entertainment? The Value of Industry Definitions.’ Entertainment Values: How Do We Assess Entertainment and Why Does It Matter? Ed. Stephen Harrington. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. 11–22. Davis, Mark. ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm.’ Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007. 116–131.

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Della Robinson English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. Flanagan, Richard. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin Random House, 2013. Gabler, Neal. Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Knopf, 1998. Galligan, Anne. ‘Build the Author, Sell the Book: Marketing the Australian Author in the 1990s.’ JASAL (1998): 151–159. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. ‘J.M. Coetzee Makes a Rare UK Appearance.’ South African 15 Jun. 2009. . Keneally, Thomas. Searching for Schindler. Sydney, NSW: Knopf, 2007. Keneally, Thomas, and Rosie Scott, ed. Another Country. Sydney, NSW: Halstead, 2004. Laurie, Victoria. ‘Tom Keneally, Writer, 79: Ten Questions.’ Australian 2 May 2015. . Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. McKee, Alan, et al. ‘Defining Entertainment: An Approach.’ Creative Industries Journal 7.2 (2014): 108–120. Moran, Joe. ‘The Reign of Hype: The Contemporary (Literary) Star System.’ The Celebrity Culture Reader. Ed. David P. Marshall. New York: Routledge, 2006. 324–344. Morris, Linda. ‘After 50 Years, Writer Tom Keneally Takes a Bow.’ Sydney Morning Herald 11 Jun. 2014. . Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pierce, Peter. Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally’s Fiction. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995. Robinson, Della. Unpublished interview with Thomas Keneally. 25 Nov. 2014. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion, 2001. ———. Fame Attack: The Inflation of Celebrity and its Consequences. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Shumway, David. ‘Cultural Studies and Questions of Pleasure and Value.’ The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Ed. Michael Bérubé. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 103–116. Shusterman, Richard. ‘Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics.’ British Journal of Aesthetics 43.3 (2003): 289–307. Sorensen, Rosemary. ‘The Power of the Prize.’ Australian 16 Jun. 2007. . Neill, Rosemary. ‘Fully Formed: 30 Years of the Australian/Vogel Literary Award.’ Australian 23 Apr. 2011. . ———. ‘A Prize of One’s Own.’ Australian 6 Apr. 2013. . Sullivan, Jane. ‘Turning Pages: Why Readers are Turning Away from Literary Fiction.’ Sydney Morning Herald 18 Jan. 2018. . Taylor, Brian. ‘Unseemly Language and the Law in New South Wales.’ Arts 17 (1995): 23–45. Van Krieken, Robert. Celebrity Society. New York: Routledge, 2012. Walton, James. ‘Thomas Keneally: I Wanted to be Recognised by the Poms.’ Telegraph 7 Oct. 2015. . Wernick, Andrew. ‘Promotional Culture.’ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 15.1–3 (1991): 260–281. Wolf, Michael. The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces are Transforming our Lives. New York: Random House, 1999.

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17 AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY Leigh Dale

In 1930, Queensland academic and literary scholar F.W. Robinson implicitly staked a claim for the study of Australian literature in declaring to a meeting of colleagues that 2700 collections of poetry and, since 1914, 80 novels had been published in the country (‘New History Needed’).1 Search the AustLit database for these periods, and we find 2265 collections of verse and 1181 novels – nearly 15 times the number of novels, yet fewer books of poetry. Robinson seems to have documented poetry that has not been preserved, but the vast proportion of novels eluded his view. This chapter aims to document ‘Australian literature and the universities,’ while reflecting on the complexity of writing disciplinary history from even apparently stable sources. It focusses on universities in Australia over the last hundred years, a period in which ‘English’ won then lost a central position in the humanities and in the public sphere. Having undergraduate subjects titled ‘Australian Literature,’ and named academic positions (Chair of Australian Literature), mean visibility, perhaps more so for those outside the universities than within. But there might be better ways to gauge the health of the field, better questions to ask. We could ask, for example, whether subjects are accessible to students within degree programmes, or, if ‘on the books,’ whether they are actually taught. In fact, Australian literature has often been excluded or dropped from English majors and degrees on ‘administrative’ grounds: in the middle decades of the twentieth century because it ‘could not fit’ into an English degree; in the twenty-first century because Arts degrees have ‘Too Many Courses’ (Lamond). Key sources for a history of Australian literature and the universities are course or subject catalogues (now, websites); archives, such as student notes and staff files; press coverage, academic publications, and organisational records.2 What remains hidden in this history is the work and opinions of students, a serious gap in the field that remains because records are not compiled. However, research capacity has been improved dramatically by two extraordinary ‘national’ resources: the National Library of Australia’s newspaper database, a full-text collection of hundreds of regional and metropolitan Australian newspapers, and the abovementioned AustLit, a bibliographical database of creative writing in Australia and critical commentary on it, which was launched by Gough Whitlam in 1988 (‘Literary Study Plugs into Computer Age’). AustLit allows users to search by author, title, and publication details, as well as by theme. At the time of writing there had been 1544 mentions of ‘universities and academics’ in Australian literature, in 220 poems, 130 novels, 71 autobiographies, and 15 plays – numbers that we can regard with a certain suspicion. But it does seem that it was creative writing and not a university that gave the world its first professor of Australian literature: Dave Oswy of Saddlebourne University, a character in Charles Jury’s play The Sun in Servitude from 1961. The most studied 163

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of these ‘universities in literature’ texts is Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994), an electrifying novel in poetry about the battles of a lesbian detective against an academic. It is a book that refuses to provide an unequivocal or ‘just’ ending. So, too, this account of debates about the teaching of Australian literature, which runs more along the lines of The Bold and the Beautiful – a long-running television saga with frequently repeated couplings and un-couplings among the same people – than a romance with a happy ending in which Australian Literature marries the Minister for Education and thereby obtains enough money to live happily ever after. Australian literary studies is a field within the discipline of what is called English, or Literary Studies. It is shaped by forces that are, in the well-worn phrase, global and local. In relation to the ‘global,’ ideas about how to study literature were changed in Australia and in Britain in the aftermath of the First World War, before which it had been routine for students of ‘Modern Literature’ to complete postgraduate study in German universities. And English changed again after the Second World War, when the opening of universities to returned soldiers changed and challenged the makeup of the student body, while the (often coercive) moral energy of Leavisism helped to drive the study of English to the centre of university and school curricula. In the last 30 years, the decisive force in Australian literary studies in Australia has been political. The federal government, the main source of public funding for Australian universities, shifted from regarding them as a public good, to perceiving them as wholesalers of degrees to individuals who derive private benefit from an education. Universities no longer provide a service to society but constitute an industry, as the number of students has increased from the low hundreds in each state a century ago to a figure that recently crossed 1.5 million nationally (Universities Australia). The COVID-19 pandemic has brutally exposed the dangers of structuring higher education as an export industry, and exacerbated the already extreme volatility experienced in most humanities disciplines in Australian universities since the early 1990s. Literary studies is affected also by the book industry; the professional media; secondary schools; social media; reading groups; and private readers. The academic study of literary texts is a small albeit significant aspect of the literary ecology; it is, simultaneously, an almost invisible dot in the vast tertiary landscape. Advocates of study of the national literature at tertiary level have tended to speak from three positions. The first and most obvious is a kind of cultural patriotism, although for advocates of Australian literary study in the first decades of the twentieth century, like Walter Murdoch (at the University of Western Australia or UWA), Archibald Strong (at Adelaide), and J.J. Stable (at Queensland), this could be combined with an equal or even greater fervency for imperialism. For example, Stable was unusual in including Australian literature in his school anthology The Bond of Poetry (1924), and he also presided over a formal discussion on how to promote study (‘Australian Literature: Teaching in the Schools’). But Stable’s ‘bond’ was of empire, in a time when Australians were not citizens of their own country, but British subjects. A related view, apparently nationalist, is better understood in terms of the dictum to ‘know thyself,’ or at least to appreciate one’s own culture. For example, one writer in 1943 said of Australian wildflowers and poetry that both have ‘a colour and rare beauty of their own’ (Clinch). Linked to this ‘appreciation of the local’ argument is the unspoken assumption that if Australians themselves do not study their literature others will not either, which brings us to the third argument: the economic. If they do not sell books overseas (and some do), or do not write genre fiction (and many do not), Australian writers have rarely been able to make a living from their work (Allen). Having books taught, in universities and especially in schools, helps recognition and sales. And teaching at universities has been an important source of income for some writers, among the earliest being Shakespeare scholar John le Gay Brereton, and his contemporary Christopher Brennan, both poets, who held teaching positions at Sydney in the 1920s in English and German respectively (Brennan was sacked in 1925). Opponents of the study of Australian literature have put the case that there was none, or that it was of poor quality, thereby often manifesting what A.A. Phillips in 1950 would memorably label 164

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the ‘cultural cringe.’ Clearly, for some academics, the thought of making critical interpretations of living writers has been a kind of betrayal of the discipline that should only deal with older texts, or simply something to be feared. Writing in 1953, Miles Franklin condemned literary scholars who preferred studied writers to be ‘safely dead,’ a phrase she borrowed from Bulletin editor A.G. Stephens (Dale 232). Another view, often hinted but rarely stated explicitly, has been that Australian literature was racially and linguistically inadequate, thus should never be confused with the books that had ‘made England great.’ Writing in this mode A.B. Taylor, professor of English at the University of Tasmania, opposed advocates of the study of Australian literature by insisting that ‘the study of literature must be more than a study of isolated works or authors. The course … must be a unified plan’ (‘Denial of Neglect’). Not many scholars believe that a ‘national literature’ is an organic, living body of a unique kind that must be read and studied in chronological order of writing, but some do. It is not coincidental that such views were strengthened in the wake of the surging English nationalism that was integral to the rise of the discipline of English in England after the First World War, although it was sedimented into some forms of literary study throughout the nineteenth century. It is a model of literature that takes ideas about the value of the unity of a single work espoused by writers like Plato and Aristotle and applies them to a national literature, making scholars of this bent unforgiving of change, conflict, and difference in the study of literary texts. Modern research supports Taylor’s contemporary, Robinson, in contending that it is impossible to imagine that literary study could ever be of a ‘whole,’ whether that ‘whole’ were to be a national literature or – the ultimate bibliographical fantasy – every book ever published. Every degree at every university distributes study into manageable amounts of material called ‘subjects,’ through debate about selection and sequence among those who teach them. So, rather than seeing competing interpretations or debates about value as signs of cultural or intellectual or even moral weakness – an inability to agree on what is great or important – literary studies as a discipline tends to understand this debate as a sign of strength and interest: literature matters; texts have multiple and complex dimensions; it is the work of the discipline to open out these possibilities, rather than bringing down a gavel and declaring some books ‘great,’ others not worth reading. Here, we see competing beliefs about the function of the university: on the one hand, that it should be an old-style museum, preserving ‘the best that has been thought and said’; on the other, that it is a vital participant in the formation of literary and cultural values, thus its role is performed with optimal integrity when reflection on the values that underpin the choice and discussion of texts is an integral part of literary study. The perennial battleground for debates about competing values has been in the appointment of staff, and for much of the period under discussion a specialisation in Australian literature has been a disadvantage for job applicants. At Melbourne University in 1911 the chair of English eluded the incumbent lecturer, Murdoch, in a time when incumbency was usually decisively favourable. But although he had the support of former Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, Murdoch had only Australian degrees, and had published mainly on Australian literature. Students and even members of parliament expressed their concern about the choice of a Scottish graduate of Oxford in his stead, to no avail.3 Melbourne spoke again in 1930 when the Australian Natives Association (ANA) argued several times for the value of Australian literature and the creation of a dedicated chair at Melbourne (‘Chair of Australian Literature’; Millett). The ANA and its supporters were resisted by then-professor and head of English George Cowling (see Cowling), who in 1935 would play Devil’s adversary in the Age debate on ‘The Future of Australian Literature’ (see Dale 80–82). In the same year, 1935, there was a call for a lectureship in Australian literature to be established at the University of Sydney (‘No Help’). Perceptions of the need for an appointment might have been a consequence of Brereton’s death, as he had been a friend and supporter of local writers and writing (‘Helping Hand’). His replacement in the chair of English Literature, A.J.A. Waldock, was 165

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no admirer of Australian literature, telling a prospective honours student in 1943 that there was ‘so little there’ that completing a thesis on the Australian novel would be a waste of her abilities (Moore). Perhaps he was unaware that two theses on Australian literature had already been completed at Sydney in 1922 (Heath). In the mid-1950s, a public campaign sought funds and support for a professorial position at Sydney (see Gilmore) that, when it was finally filled in 1962 through the appointment of G.A. Wilkes, would come to be an important public symbol. While public debates have focussed on appointments, curriculum has also sometimes been discussed in the print media. Following the debates in Melbourne and Sydney, in 1939 a Council member at the University of Tasmania – in what seems like a clear attack on Taylor – moved that the Faculty of Arts be required to report on ‘the nature and extent of the encouragement given by the professor of English to students doing English to study Australian literature’ (‘Study of Australian Literature’). The success of the motion was reported in Hobart’s Mercury, which had earlier published an interview with Taylor headed ‘Denial of Neglect.’ The story was picked up in Melbourne, where academic H.G. Seccombe reassured readers of the Herald that Australian literature was supported at Melbourne University, although a by now cautious Cowling ‘refused to be drawn in to a controversial discussion’ (‘Encouragement of Australian Literature’). And in fact, Taylor’s objections to teaching Australian literature did receive public support (‘Australian Literature: What Should be Taught’; ‘University Professors and Australian Texts’). As the study of English literature was being consolidated in Australian universities in the 1920s and 1930s, there was, concurrently, a little teaching of Australian literature, usually by less senior staff – Brereton being the notable exception. In English II at Melbourne in the early 1930s, Vance Palmer’s novel The Passage (1930) and Percival Serle’s An Australasian Anthology (1929) were both lectured on (Horne). Brereton and H.M. Green at Sydney and F.W. Robinson at Queensland (from the 1920s), Brian Elliott at Adelaide (from the 1930s), Joyce Eyre at Tasmania and Enid Derham at Melbourne (from the 1940s, and possibly earlier), all taught at least some Australian l iterature.4 But such study seems to have been limited in scope, precarious, and at times even grudging or derogatory: lecture notes on the Oxford Book of Australian Verse taken at Melbourne report the lecturer’s assertion that Australian writers have been limited by poor education, poverty, and a liking for ‘the bottle’: ‘So many of our Australian poets have been drunkards!’ (Gouldthorpe). The more serious point is cultural: perceived flaws of character might help to make an English writer glamorous – think Lord Byron – but in an Australian writer become proof of inferiority. Concurrently with this university teaching, Australian books and poems were held and/or taught in schools, colleges, university libraries, and Workers Education Association (WEA) classes. For example, two Sydney newspapers reported on the commencement of a WEA class in Australian literature running at Sydney University in 1927, taught by Stephens (‘Australian Literature,’ SMH; Telegraph). Some early published introductions to Australian literature were clearly aimed at students of this kind, as well as general readers (see ‘Survey’). George Mackaness, who taught at Sydney’s Fort Street Public School and Sydney Teachers’ College (in close proximity to the University), was a persistent advocate for Australian literature (in particular, see ‘No Help’), as was Andrew Millett in Melbourne. And university librarians E. Morris Miller at Tasmania and H.M. Green at Sydney played a significant part in the development of the scholarly apparatus by producing an overview (Green, An Outline) and monumental hardback reference works (Morris Miller; Green, A History). Governments have occasionally responded to media coverage of calls to study Australian literature, as for the founding of a chair earlier this century (see O’Neill; Koval), that was awarded to UWA, although as with the Sydney chair, at the time of writing this position seems to have lapsed. A federal intervention was also made in 1940 – that is, not long after Taylor was called to account in Tasmania – when the Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) wrote to universities to ask how the study of Australian literature might be stimulated. Three weeks later the CLF preempted replies by writing again, offering a hundred pounds for the employment of temporary lecturers at each 166

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of the six universities: Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland, Tasmania, and UWA (‘Denial of Neglect’). Queensland responded with ostentatious bewilderment, refusing the money on the grounds that it was already teaching Australian literature, a position that seems (remarkably) also to have been taken by Tasmania (‘Australian Literature,’ Courier-Mail). Nonetheless, both subsequently accepted the money and held the lectures (‘Lectures’; ‘Australian Literature,’ Mercury). In the 1940s the CLF lectures tended to be given by writers, and by women, among them Marjorie Barnard, Miles Franklin, Katharine Prichard, and (critic) Nettie Palmer, part of a cohort of writers and educators who made public and private pleas for the value of literature and for its study.5 Later, Judith Wright lectured at the Australian National University (‘Canberra Diary’), and in 1956 is said to have attracted a crowd when speaking on ‘technical aspects of Australian poetry’ at the University of Queensland (‘500 Heard Qld Poet’s Lecture’).6 What did not happen is that these lectures, delivered in the 1940s and 1950s, became an ‘integral part’ of degrees as the CLF had suggested they should, although attendance was sometimes compulsory for English students. It is a sign of the wider insecurity around Australian literature that visiting scholars from overseas have long proved an attraction, even an oddity, for the Australian press. The first of these was American journalist C. Hartley Grattan, whose brief study was reviewed in 1929 (O’L.). Gustav Hübener, who was teaching Australian literature at the University of Bonn, visited several Australian cities in 1934, participating in a radio discussion in Melbourne (Palmer 135–136), and publishing his own essays (Hubener [sic]). Later visitors, all from north America, included Bruce Sutherland in 1951–1952 (‘Praise for Australian Literature’; Bartlett), Martin C. Carroll (probably 1952–1954; ‘Study is Extended’), and C.T. Bissell in 1954 (‘Making Study of Austn Culture’). Several Fulbright scholars studied at Canberra University College in 1953 and 1954 (‘Six Fulbright Scholars’), one of whom was to write an early article on ‘Environment and Australian Novels’ (Bielenstein). Similar stories on the puzzle of overseas interest in Australian literature can be found in the 1980s and 1990s (Reeves; Iffland). But not all visitors were enthusiasts: an academic teaching English at Yale was reported (in the Westralian Worker) in 1945 as believing that ‘no civilised nation can understand itself until it has a characteristic and distinctive literature of its own’ and doubting ‘whether Australia has such a literature’ (‘Australian Literature’), albeit that when in Melbourne he had suggested that conditions were ‘ripe’ for such a literature to emerge (‘Australian Conditions’). Controversy about teaching Australian literature in universities shifted into scholarly journals in the 1950s and 1960s, largely at the instigation of Meanjin editor Clem Christesen, who began by publishing essays on teaching (see Sutherland). He then asked all heads of departments of English at Australian universities to contribute a forum on the study of Australian literature (see Edwards). Very slow inroads were made in tertiary curriculum, better progress in research: by the 1960s, theses on Australian literature were regularly being completed, notably at Sydney (Dale 219). Other key indicators of increasing interest are the first, full course in the subject taught in 1955 by Tom Inglis Moore at Canberra University College (then under the control of Melbourne University), it having been an ‘experimental non-examination’ one in 1954 (‘University College’); the founding of the academic journal Australian Literary Studies in 1963 (the first devoted purely to scholarship); and the first conference and the founding of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) at Monash University in Melbourne in 1978 (‘Wide Variety of Topics’). The most decisive government intervention came in the 1970s and 1980s, a series of coordinated efforts to promote and fund the production and study of Australian books and film. Crucially, these interventions came at a time of significant and enthusiastic expansion in the university sector, with money available for new universities, new degrees, and new subject areas. In 1975, Bruce Bennett claimed that 14 of Australia’s 15 universities offered subjects in Australian literature that had 1640 enrolled students (Bennett; Donlevy). Today, the proportion of universities that teach Australian literature is much lower: just over half of the 43 larger institutions offer subjects, only 17 consistently. For although there are 52 subjects listed on websites, only half of these were 167

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offered in both 2019 and 2020, while seven were not offered in either year. It seems more than likely that not many more students are studying Australian literature in 2020 as were doing so 45 years ago, notwithstanding that the number of students in Australian universities has increased some 20-fold since then. For most students in most universities the only ‘Australian literature’ available is a single survey course. These are, as Julieanne Lamond points out, ‘vulnerable to looking like a list of Great Books, which presents obstacles to teaching historically: to give a sense of how works travelled and were received, and how they came to be valued, or not.’ Only five universities offer themed subjects, the most popular topic being Indigenous writing. In that sense, the subject offerings reflect a model of the discipline from half a century ago, rather than the enormous diversity of method now evident in Anglophone literary studies. When we look to a nation like Canada, it is possible to see just how threadbare Anglophone literary studies in Australian universities has become. Sydney has easily the largest number of academics teaching literature, around 25, while the University of Toronto, comparable in size and status, has more than 90. Just south of the cities of Sydney and Toronto lie the smaller cities of Wollongong and Hamilton (respectively), which have universities of a similar size to each other. At the time of writing, the eponymous Wollongong had four staff to deliver the English major; at McMaster in Hamilton, there were 24. The problem is not new: in a speech delivered in 1920 in the Great Hall at Sydney University, Mungo MacCallum noted that Manchester University’s Modern Languages Department had 500 students being taught by 13 lecturers; at Sydney, a slightly higher number was being taught by ‘2⅔’ (MacCallum). The news for writers, on the other hand, is vastly better. Only a handful of universities do not offer creative writing in some form, most commonly as a full major, often complemented by postgraduate coursework and research degree programs: more universities, more subjects within them, entire undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Literary prize shortlists are packed with the work of graduates of creative writing courses, including Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions (2016) which took home the Miles Franklin and the Colin Roderick Awards in 2017. Coordinated government action and support within universities produced a ‘high water mark’ of the study of Australian literature from that the 1970s to the end of the millennium, but in the twenty-first century the centre of gravity in ‘Australian literature’ in Australian universities has shifted decisively from consumption (reading) to production (writing). Dave Oswy is smiling.

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Works Cited ‘500 Heard Qld Poet’s Lecture.’ Courier-Mail 1 Aug. 1956: 9. Allen, L.H. ‘Plea for Help: Australian Literature: Rewarding of Works.’ Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate 7 Nov. 1933: 8. ‘Australian Conditions Ripe for Great Books.’ Herald 6 Apr. 1945: 8. ‘Australian Literature.’ Courier-Mail 16 Mar. 1940: 4. ‘Australian Literature,’ Mercury 15 Jun. 1940: 10. ‘Australian Literature.’ Sydney Morning Herald 12 Mar. 1927: 19. ‘Australian Literature.’ Telegraph 12 Mar. 1927: 22. ‘Australian Literature.’ Westralian Worker 27 Apr. 1945: 5. ‘Australian Literature: Teaching in the Schools.’ Telegraph [Brisbane] 19 Jun. 1929: 10. ‘Australian Literature: What Should Be Taught by the University.’ Mercury 3 Aug. 1939: 16. Bartlett, Norman. ‘He Has Come to Study Our Writers.’ Daily Telegraph [Sydney] 10 Nov. 1951: 13. Bennett, Bruce. ‘Australian Literature at the Universities.’ Melbourne Studies in Education. Ed. Stephen Murray-Smith. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 1976. 106–156. Bielenstein, Gabrielle Maupin. ‘Environment and Australian Novels.’ Prometheus (1956): 25–28. ‘Canberra Diary.’ Canberra Times 16 Sept. 1954: 4. ‘Chair of Australian Literature: Not Favoured by Some Professors.’ Age 14 May 1930: 17. Clinch, C.A. ‘Australian Literature.’ Northern Champion [Taree] 31 Mar. 1943: 4. Cowling, G.H. ‘Australian Literature: Proposed University Chair: Comment by Professor Cowling.’ Age 21 May 1930: 13. Dale, Leigh. The Enchantment of English: Professing Literature in Australian Universities. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2012. ‘Denial of Neglect: Study of Australian Literature.’ Mercury [Hobart] 5 Aug. 1939: 6. Donlevy, Maurice. ‘Back to the Pepper Tree to Study Literature.’ Canberra Times 14 Aug. 1976: 10. Edwards, Allan. ‘Australian Literature Courses.’ Meanjin 11 (1952): 172–177. ‘Encouragement of Australian Literature.’ Herald [Melbourne] 2 Aug. 1939: 20. Ferrier, Carole, ed. As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Gilmore, Mary. ‘Mary Gilmore’s Arrows.’ Tribune 29 Aug. 1956: 8. Gouldthorpe, Alexandra Daisy. Lecture Notes, Student Notes Society, English III. Group 3/4, File 1, Alexandra Daisy Gouldthorpe Papers. University of Melbourne Archives. Green, H.M. An Outline of Australian Literature. Sydney, NSW: Whitcomb and Tombs, 1930. ———. A History of Australian Literature: Pure and Applied. A Critical Review of All Forms of Literature Produced in Australia from the First Books Published after the Arrival of the First Fleet until 1950, with Short Accounts of Later Publications up to 1960. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1961. Heath, Lesley. The Muse at Sydney, Literature at the University of Sydney 1852–1932. Unpublished Hons diss. University of New South Wales, 1990. ‘Helping Hand, The: Professor Brereton and Australian Literature.’ Sydney Mail 12 Oct. 1927: 12. Horne, Colin J. Student Lecture Notes, English, Book for English II. Box 1, Colin J. Horne Papers. University of Melbourne Archives. Hubener, G. [Gustav Hübener]. ‘How I Came to Study Australian Literature.’ Sun [Sydney] 23 Sept. 1934: 4. ———. ‘Australian Literature: A Comparative Survey.’ West Australian 18 Oct. 1934: 23. Iffland, Katrina. ‘An American Scholar Who is Dedicated to Wide Debate about Australian Literature.’ Canberra Times 22 Apr. 1995: 53. Jury, Charles Rischbieth. ‘The Sun in Servitude.’ The Sun in Servitude and Other Plays. Melbourne, VIC: Cheshire, 1961. 149–217. Koval, Ramona, with Bernadette Brennan, Stephanie Guest, and Sue Martin. ‘The State of Australian Literature at Our Universities.’ The Book Show. ABC Radio National. 25 Aug. 2011. . Lamond, Julieanne. ‘A Fool’s Game? On Gender and Literary Value.’ Sydney Review of Books 18 Mar. 2019. . ‘Lectures on Australian Literature Available to Public at University.’ Telegraph [Brisbane] 28 Jun. 1940: 9. ‘Literary Study Plugs into Computer Age.’ Canberra Times 10 Aug. 1988: 29. MacCallum, Mungo. ‘Draft of a Speech.’ 22 Oct. 1920. Box 2, Holme Papers [sic], University of Sydney Archives. ‘Making Study of Austn Culture.’ Examiner [Launceston] 17 Jul. 1954: 3.

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Leigh Dale Millett, A.G. ‘Chair of Australian Literature.’ Letter to the Editor. Age 20 May 1930: 7. ———. ‘Chair of Australian Literature.’ Letter to the Editor. Age 27 May 1930: 7. Moore, Deirdre. ‘Cultural Cringe in Academe: Studying Literature in the 1940s.’ Australian Literary Studies 22.1 (2005): 90–93. Morris Miller, E. Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935: A Descriptive and Bibliographical Survey of Books by Australian Authors in Poetry, Drama, Fiction, Criticism and Anthology with Subsidiary Entries to 1938. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, in association with Oxford UP, 1940. ‘New History Needed: Australian Literature.’ Daily Standard [Brisbane] 5 Jun. 1930: 5. ‘No Help in Schools: Aust. Literature.’ Sun [Sydney] 14 Mar. 1935: 9. O’L., P.I. [Patrick O’Leary]. ‘An American Critic on Australian Literature. [Rev. Australian Literature, by C. Hartley Grattan.] Advocate [Melbourne] 19 Dec. 1929: 5. O’Neill, Rosemary. ‘Universities Cold Shoulder Our Literature.’ Australian 4 Jun. 2007: 8. Palmer, Nettie. ‘Fourteen Years: Extracts from a Private Journal, 1925–1939.’ Her Private Journal ‘Fourteen Years,’ Poems, Reviews and Literary Essays. Ed. Vivian Smith. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988. 6–250. Phillips, A.A. ‘The Cultural Cringe.’ Meanjin 9.4 (1950): 299–302. Porter, Dorothy. The Monkey’s Mask. South Melbourne, VIC: Hyland House, 1994. ‘Praise for Australian Literature.’ Age 17 Jun. 1952: 2. Reeves, Janet. ‘A Love of Australian Literature.’ Canberra Times 23 Jun. 1987: 3. ‘Six Fulbright Scholars to Study in Canberra.’ Canberra Times 5 Nov. 1954: 2. Spaulding, Ralph. ‘Joyce Eyre and Australian Literature at the University of Tasmania.’ Australian Literary Studies 23.4 (2008): 463–473. Stable, J.J., ed. The Bond of Poetry: A Book of Verse for Australasian Schools. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1927. ‘Study Is Extended.’ West Australian 24 Nov. 1953: 7. ‘Study of Australian Literature.’ Mercury [Hobart] 12 Aug. 1939: 10. ‘Survey of Australian Literature. [Rev. Creative Writing in Australia, by J.K. Ewers].’ Advertiser 6 Oct. 1945: 4. Sutherland, Bruce. ‘On Australian Literature.’ Meanjin 9 (1950): 45–49. ———. ‘An American Looks at Australian Literature.’ Meanjin 11 (1952): 152–157. ‘To Lecture to his Teacher.’ Courier-Mail 23 Jul. 1956: 6. Universities Australia. ‘Data Snapshot 2019.’ Key Facts and Data. . ‘University College Adds New Examination Courses.’ Canberra Times 20 Oct. 1954: 2. ‘University Professors and Australian Texts.’ [Letter to the editor signed ‘Country Graduate.’] Mercury 5 Aug. 1939: 6. ‘Wide Variety of Topics at Literature Conference.’ Canberra Times 31 May 1978: 27.

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18 AN AUSTRALIAN ETHICS OF READING? Maggie Nolan

What does it mean to be an ethical reader? Is it an attitude that one brings to a text, or is it a mode or practice of reading? If so, what would that practice look like? How does one become an ethical reader? Does it require disciplinary training, or does reading ethically pay no heed to literary features? Can an ethical relation to a text be established in advance – or does it emerge through the process and practice of reading? And, more pertinent to this collection, but also more speculatively, is there a national dimension to these questions – is there an Australian ethics of reading? This chapter explores these questions in the context of book clubs, and particularly cross-cultural reading practices in book clubs, the study of which have challenged and refined my thinking on what it might mean to read a book ethically (see Nolan and Clarke; Clarke and Nolan; Nolan, ‘Reading Kim Scott’; Nolan and Henaway; Nolan, ‘Reading Massacre’). It provides an overview of recent scholarship on reading as an ethical practice, and outlines key approaches to the ethics of reading through the lens of shared reading in book clubs. This kind of vernacular criticism repositions these approaches in a range of fruitful ways. I draw upon the work of John Guillory, who has theorised the importance of bridging the gap between lay and professional reading, suggesting that book clubs may well do so. Indeed, book club reading practices enable us to rethink the value of reading in community and to conceive of book clubs as ethical spaces that promote dialogue and negotiated understandings. Reading is a deeply heterogeneous practice and this chapter concludes by arguing that it is only by bringing together the full range of approaches to the ethics of reading that we can understand the value of reading as an ethical practice. In the early twenty-first century, literary studies and theory embraced the ‘turn to ethics,’ which was generally understood in two ways: on the one hand, deconstructive approaches to ethics emphasised the radical undecidability of texts and the unknowability of the other in its absolute difference; on the other were those who focussed on literature’s role in the development of empathy. This strand has focussed on literary fiction as a resource for both moral reflection and perspective-taking. This latter view, as we will see, is complicated by unresolved debates about the ethics and politics of literary identification, which have tended to reinforce an adherence to the ethics of unknowability. More recently, the question of the ethics of reading can be reframed by the emergence of postcritique which enables us to move beyond the debates about knowability and unknowability. Rita Felski has been at the forefront of calls for a reading praxis underpinned by a more hopeful attitude which engages with the affective dimensions of reading. Like Guillory, Felski challenges the ways in which the practice of critique has encouraged an antagonistic and distrustful disposition to the wider world, asserting that ‘there is no compelling reason why the practice of [literary] theory requires us to go behind the backs of ordinary persons in order to expose their beliefs as deluded or 171

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delinquent’ (13). Felski encourages us to move beyond the limitations of critique, and urges more heterogeneous approaches: ‘Any attempt to clarify the value of literature must surely engage the diverse motives of readers and ponder the mysterious event of reading’ (17). Book clubs, where people come together, more often than not out of a love for reading, to discuss books, offer an opportunity to ponder one manifestation of such mysterious events. Before elaborating upon approaches to the ethics of reading, it is worth offering a brief sketch of current book club research both in Australia, and globally. Book clubs constitute one of the most widespread forms of cultural participation in contemporary Australia yet, in spite of large research projects in both Europe and North America, we know little about everyday reading practices in Australia and the ethics, if any, that underpin them. Nor do we have any accurate figures around the number of people that participate in book clubs. Existing research on book clubs, however, does offer insights into how ordinary readers engage with literary culture and how book talk is used to discuss ethical issues of both personal and public significance. In the Australian context, this may mean, among other things, thinking through what it means to be part of a settler colonial culture and its devastating legacies. My primary example is face-to-face book clubs that read literary novels, but there is a large and growing online environment of subcultural and genre-based book clubs that cross national boundaries and digital fora. Even face-to-face book clubs cover a wide sphere of activity – while there is a huge network of informal book clubs based in people’s homes, there are also numerous book clubs hosted by book shops, local libraries, and work places, as well as other institutions – and are thus connected to both the corporate world and the state. The popularity of book clubs, in spite of increasing demands on people’s leisure time, suggest a continuing thirst for literature among the Australian book-reading public that contradicts or at least complicates arguments about the undervaluing of the humanities. Having said that, like other places in the Anglo-American world, reading literary novels in Australia is on the decline. I use literary, here, in the sense that Tony Hughes-d’Aeth does, ‘not to designate the line between fact and fiction, but to signal the recourse to the imaginative faculty’ (7). While many book clubs read and discuss literary fiction, book club readers often apply different modes of reading from those that dominate in the academy. Book clubs tend to choose realist narratives ‘that provide occasion for emotional and personal introspection, while steering clear of formally challenging or disturbing high literary culture’ (Davis, ‘White Book Clubs’ 159). As a result, book clubs are often dismissed as middlebrow, although other research challenges the gendered assumptions of such claims and explores the complex relationship of book clubs to professional cultural authorities. Meaning in book clubs is generated and negotiated in the shared space of the book club setting and derived through discussion and, very often, framed by personal and affective experience. Jenny Hartley observes that book club readers typically value texts with strong characters, and plots and settings with which they can identify and empathise (125–138). In book club discussions, reading thus moves beyond the book and connects with the concerns of readers’ everyday lives. Personal experience is a valid lens through which to interpret meaning; indeed, such personal perspectives are welcome, and the resulting discussion has the capacity to shift readers’ perspectives, assumptions, and understandings not only of the text, but of themselves and the lives of others. This mode of reading is quite different from dominant modes of reading in the literary academy. Guillory has outlined the gap between reading as it is practised within and outside of the academy, arguing that they have become ‘so disconnected that it has become hard to see how they are both reading’ (34). Whereas professional reading is work, disciplinary, vigilant, and communal, lay reading is for both pleasure and leisure, has different conventions from the discipline of literary studies, and is generally solitary. For Guillory, the persistence of the gap between these two modes of reading has led to an incapacity to recognise that reading is nothing other than an ethical practice; indeed, for Guillory, reading is ‘the principle ethical practice of modernity’ (42). Guillory makes this claim through recourse to the work of Michel Foucault, and he conceptualises reading 172

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as a form of care for the self. For Guillory, reading is a practice of the self in which the motive of pleasure contains within it what was known as ‘self-improvement’; indeed, as Guillory notes, it was ‘the experience of pleasure itself that was to produce the improving effect’ (41). Guillory traces the history of reading and suggests that the hardening of the division between lay and professional reading during the nineteenth century meant that, just as reading emerged as an ethical practice of modernity, it was subsumed ‘on the one side to mere consumption, and on the other to highly serious professionalised labour’ (43). For Guillory, the most serious consequence of the lack of communication and dialogue between professional and lay readers is that it ‘evacuates the public sphere of any discourse that is not merely entertaining’ (43): If the practice of reading is either lay or professional, either pleasure or spectacle, but never both, it is difficult to see how the public sphere is ever to be other than it is now, a massified sphere of entertainment, in which the discourse of the professionals is assimilated only in the most refracted and distorted form, as a threat to the pleasure of the people. (43–44) What I would like to suggest, however, is that book clubs may be a site for exploring what these two modes share because their praxis lies between these two types of reading – book club reading is for leisure, but has an aspirational and communal quality that aligns it with professionalism. Although Guillory suggests that professional reading is communal while lay reading is solitary, the phenomenon of the book club challenges this distinction. James Procter and Bethan Benwell have drawn out what kind of space the book club might be, reworking Stanley Fish’s notion of ‘interpretive communities’ by conceptualising book clubs as ‘reading formations,’ which ‘mobilise the production of meaning, regulating what can and cannot be said about a given book’ (10). Reading-oriented researchers such as Elizabeth Long have theorised the cultural work of book clubs and the meanings they produce. Jenny Hartley, in her study of British book clubs, suggests that book clubs provide a ‘forum for a level of debate and conversation not easily found elsewhere’ (137), and Frances Devlin-Glass’s Australian study argues that book clubs help their members to participate ‘in global debates and negotiate their place in the world as individuals and collectively’ (583). More recently, Robert Clarke and I have looked at the ways book clubs manage both consensus and disagreement, drawing attention to the book club as a space in which members engage in conversations that both ‘reflect and help to fashion their understandings of their own identities, their cultures, and others’ (131). Lindsey Howie’s work explores book club dynamics ‘and personal experience as self-reflexive practice that supports the development of shifting self-knowledges’ (141). But it is not just that people learn about themselves through shared modes of reading. Recent research suggests that reading also enhances people’s capacity for empathy.

Ethics of Reading: Empathy Perhaps the most widespread argument for reading as an ethical practice is that reading opens up the subjective worlds of others, thus generating empathy and thereby cultivating character, a view espoused most forcefully by Martha Nussbaum, but one that is widely shared by scholars in the fields of literary studies, including cognitive literary studies, educators, publishers and book club readers. Empathy has a wide range of definitions, but at its simplest it can be defined as a ‘vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect’ (Keen 4). As story-sharing creatures, we react to reading narrative fiction by imaginatively apprehending how life feels to other people in their interior worlds, making reading an important technology for perspective-taking. In inhabiting the lives of others, particularly lives unlike our own, through the psychological process of identification, we get an opportunity to experience selves with inner worlds as complex as our own. Book club readers, who tend to read fiction with a strong plot and character development, have long reported 173

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empathy with fictional characters, believing that their minds are thereby open to experiences, periods, and places that would otherwise be closed to them. Nussbaum makes rather grand claims for the narrative imagination and its empathic effects: ‘Habits of empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a certain form of community: one that cultivates a certain type of responsiveness to another’s needs, and understands the way circumstances shapes those needs, while respecting separateness and privacy’ (90). While there is ongoing debate about whether or not empathetic feelings elicited during reading translate into altruistic behaviour, the process of empathic readerly identification raises ethical questions of its own. Much contemporary work on book clubs suggest that book club readers bring a high degree of openness and engagement to their understanding of others, even in cross-cultural contexts. Readers tend to judge the success of books on how easily they can identify with characters, and there is a danger, perhaps, that in seeking a shared emotional response, real differences can be erased.

Ethics of Reading: Identification A key question is whether empathic identification is the grounds for a politics of affiliation or a form of cannibalistic consumption that annihilates the other. Scholars such as Elin Diamond argue that identifying with cultural others is an ethical duty, and through doing so, alliances are formed and the boundaries between social identities are realigned. Similarly, Kimberly Chabot Davis’s work on members of Oprah’s book club ‘underscores the importance of empathetic crossings within cultural space can play in the development of anti-racist coalitions’ (‘Oprah’s Book Club’ 399). While stressing the need to avoid utopian interpretations of the role of affect in social change, such work invites us to rethink the social practice of reading in contemporary culture, and to reconsider its potential for transforming social relations, a potential that one would neither want to overstate nor underestimate. Others, however, are adamant that such easy identifications are the very antithesis of ethical reading. bell hooks, among others, reminds white consumers of the pleasures of identifying with cultural others. Doris Sommer has long advocated this position, arguing that underpinning the white consumption of minority culture are violent fantasies of displacement. She challenges readers to read what she refers to as ‘books with attitude,’ those that maintain a distance and thwart readers’ attempts at intimacy and empathy. For Sommer, ‘[w]ell-meaning readers who hope to overcome limits through empathy and learning aren’t harmless when they violate difference’ (205). She adds that we should be wary of a reading practice that does not question the ‘exorbitant (and unethical) but usually unspoken assumption that we should know Others enough to speak to them’ (206). In the Australian settler colonial context, this position has been most clearly articulated by Alison Ravenscroft. In The Postcolonial Eye (2012), Ravenscroft asks ‘whether prevailing reading practices are a modern repetition of the relations of colonialism where a coloniser-settler encounters an Indigenous subject as if the self-same’ (19). In this sense, Ravenscroft, like Sommer, outlines her understanding of a more ethical reading practice: This is reading as a process through which we bring ourselves into uncertainty, through which we cause doubt to fall on our perceptions. This is an idea of reading not (or not only) as that act which brings us into knowledge, but one that puts our knowledge under pressure until we can say: ‘I do not – cannot - know the other.’ And then to hold with this willingness to be an unknowing reader a willingness to read anyway. (20) Such appeals to a more ethical and uncertain reading practice that privileges unknowing are not always convincing. Apart from the danger of fetishising difference that tends to mark such theoretical approaches, such a form of reading is inevitably an elite and rarefied practice; a capacity to 174

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affirm and tolerate unintelligibility and incommensurability strikes me as a form of reading that can only take place in the academy and so its claims to be offering a superior, more ethical form of reading may well be undermined by its privileged location and its own structural exclusions. While non-professional readers, and particularly book club readers, frequently read books that are challenging, they generally read in order to gain insight and understanding, not to be confronted with the impossibility, or the ethically dubious nature, of such aspirations.

Ethics of Reading: Uncertainty The ethics of uncertainty, however, has a broader history influenced by deconstructive approaches to texts. Such approaches emphasise the quality of openness towards that which is unknown. Attention to the fissures within a text encourages readers (invariably scholars) to find a reading position from which uncertainty becomes a ground for ethics. Derek Attridge’s work on J.M. Coetzee exemplifies this deconstructive approach to the ethics of reading. Attridge sets up a binary framework between literal and allegorical reading. For Attridge, ‘allegorical reading’ apprehends the text as preformulated object. Allegorical reading, he notes, while often illuminating, is in danger of ‘moving too quickly beyond the novel to find its significance elsewhere, of treating it not as an inventive literary work drawing us into unfamiliar emotional and cognitive territory but as a reminder of what we already know only too well’ (43). For Attridge, ethical reading is literal reading – open-ended and ‘grounded in the experience of reading as an event.’ It invites an ethical response because it engages with the work as unknown, and thus ‘opens a space for the other’ (64). Although I suspect that Attridge did not have book club reading in mind, it is worth considering the ways in which book club readings might model such modes of reading, especially when compared to academic reading that is often characterised by overdetermined interpretations that may domesticate the reading experience. Book club readings, moreover, are able to eschew the kinds of appeals to mastery that academic readings seem to require. Indeed, my research has found that book club readers are frequently comfortable with sharing interpretative uncertainty and open-endedness in the space of the book club, even if they do not read for interpretive uncertainty.

Ethics of Reading: Post-Critique More recently, questions in relation to the ethics of reading have emerged through the lens of post-critique, an approach that opens up new interpretive orientations that serve to get around what Sedgwick has referred to as the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (123). Post-critique explores different, less paranoid ways of interpreting texts, and the ways in which a range of readers engage with them. Felski has been at the forefront of this project that involves ‘new conceptions of literary value, of the critic’s interpretive labour, and of the public role of the humanities’ (2). Post-critique pays attention to the role of affect in interpretation but also to the ways in which critique has traditionally had a strong distrust of ordinary language and the condemnation of ordinary social actors as insufficiently self-aware. Such perspectives enable a new appreciation of the ways in which book club readers engage with texts and with each other. For example, Felski’s work challenges the hardened division between ethics as empathic identification and ethics as unknowability and refusal, by mobilising the term recognition – in both the sense germane to political theory and to psychoanalysis. For Felski, recognition is not merely about knowing but acknowledgement: ‘Its force is ethical rather than epistemic’ (29). But Felski maintains an awareness of the complexities of literary recognition and the ways in which literary texts: …spark elective affinities and imaginative affiliations that bridge differences and exceed the literalism of demographic description. Such texts, moreover, can also underscore the limits of 175

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knowability through structures of negative recognition that underscore the opacity of persons and their failure to be fully transparent to themselves or others. Rather than simply debunking or disrupting recognition, in other words, the literary field offers endless illustrations of its complexity as an experiential mode and an analytical concept. (46) One can maintain, post-critique reminds us, that literary texts are one of the resources through which we come to understand ourselves and one another, even if that understanding is partial and flawed, and driven by unrecognised needs and desires. As Felski suggests, ‘we can value literary works precisely because they force us – in often unforgiving ways – to confront our failings and blind spots rather than shoring up our self-esteem’ (48).

Ethics of Reading: Gender and Class In any discussion of the ethics of reading in book clubs, it is important to pay attention to their membership. Are book clubs spaces of ethical dialogue, as I have suggested, or are they merely a leisure activity of the aspirational middle class? While there has been research about the gendered nature of books clubs, there has been less interest in the relationship between book clubs and class relations, apart from a generalised understanding that book clubs, and reading in general, are a marker of a certain kind of privilege. Wendy Griswold’s work on the reading class describe the reading class as small in number but intense in cultural influence but she does not elaborate on the relationship between the two – that is, reading and power – and the relation between reading and structures of inequality (see Griswold). So what is the class consciousness of book club members in terms of both economic and cultural capital, and what does this mean for thinking through the ethics of reading in community? Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books (1997) offers a way of thinking about these questions through a discussion of the emergence of the professional managerial class and its ambivalent relationship to capitalism – it does not control the means of production, but it does enjoy particular kinds of privileges within broader economic systems, most of which are obtained from specialised forms of knowledge which are themselves commodified. The professional managerial class tends not to identify with the labouring classes, because it struggles to understand its knowledge as commodity, but it believes it is entitled to power and autonomy on the basis of that knowledge. In her analysis of middlebrow culture, Radway identifies and seeks to understand the professional managerial class and the ‘feelings of cultural exclusion, longing and legitimation’ (4) that characterise it. In her research, she ‘continually encountered not merely the insistent desire to rise socially through any means available but also deep-seated longings for the possibilities of self-articulation and the search for transcendence promised by education and art’ (5). It is for this reason that the professional managerial class, and its reading practices, have such a fraught relationship to cultural authority and legitimacy, particularly as embodied in the elite reading practices of the academy, which claims to eschew reading as consumption. Part of the concern of literary and cultural elites, Radway suggests, is about the ‘intensifying effect of marketplace concerns on literary production’ (15). What happens, we worry, when literary objects are understood as products within consumer culture. But, as Radway suggests, literary culture and consumer culture may not, and may never have been, as contradictory as literary scholars would like to think. Here I return to Guillory, and his call for an intermediate practice between professional and lay reading, exemplified by book club reading, which is not reducible to a pure pleasure of consumption, but also not to a moral and aesthetic fantasy of virtue. For Guillory such an intermediate exercise is where reading as an ethical practice will be most evident. 176

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Ethics of Reading: Reading the Nation It is difficult to assess how any of these debates impact upon our understandings of Australian literary studies. Australian readers read in very specific contexts, a settler colonial context being one such context, but the locations and practices of reading are increasingly global and transnational. Readers rarely confine themselves to a national context, but Australian book club readers that read and discuss books by and about Australia’s violent settler colonial history can find themselves deeply unsettled, and can be challenged to rethink their understanding of what it means to be at home, and what it means to belong to the nation state. For example, white book club readers of Alex Miller’s novel Landscape of Farewell (2007) were able to use shared discussions of the shocking imaginative reconstruction of the historical massacre of white settlers by Aboriginal warriors to rethink their own understanding of Australia’s violent setter colonial history, to acknowledge Indigenous resistance, and to experience the ambivalence that such acknowledgement evoked. An engagement with reading enabled them to know and feel differently what they already thought they understood. In so doing, they were able to challenge my own limited interpretation of the novel (see Nolan, ‘Reading Massacre’). By way of contrast, for readers of Kim Scott’s Miles Franklin award-winning That Deadman Dance (2010), the shared space of the book club enabled readers to reflect on their thwarted drive to identify with Bobby Wabalanginy, the novel’s central character. That Deadman Dance is a challenging novel, but together the readers were able to tolerate difficulty, uncertainty, and an incapacity to identify in order to open to the novel’s exploration of what might have been if early colonial relations had been more mutually beneficial. In this sense, readers were able to think differently about the role of misunderstanding across times and cultures, and the importance of generosity when relating to people who are different from ourselves (see Nolan, ‘Reading Kim Scott’). Finally, my collaborative research on Townsville’s Murri book club reveals the ways in which questions of ethics, unknowingness, and empathy work in heterogeneous ways (see Nolan and Henaway). It is not only the privileged who read works of the marginalised in order to empathise or appropriate (depending on one’s point of view). The reverse may also be the case. This case study revealed that the capacity to read ethically is not only the preserve of the settler class, and this insight offers an opportunity to rethink colonial relations and the privileges that structure them. Book club readers, like all readers, engage unpredictably and variously with the books they read. But book club readings, by the very nature of the format, open up a range of readings and meanings because of the dialogic form in which meaning-making takes place. The style of reading is more tentative than that with which an academic might be comfortable – and perhaps more generous in being able to give way to the readings of others. Does this make it more ethical? It is hard to say, but the dialogue is frequently about morality, about empathy and identification, and it often intersects with both the personal and the imaginative realms. For book club readers, reading is less about interpreting a book and coming up with a definitive sense of its meaning, or even necessarily judging a book, than about participating in a communal activity that generates discussion about contemporary desires, experiences, and ideas, including ideas about what it means to be an Australian – reckoning with the past in a settler colonial society. This chapter has explored a range of perspectives one might take on the ethics of reading, and the complex ways in which they interact. In bringing these together in this way, I want to propose that reading ethically is not some prescription that can state in advance what an ethical reading of a text would be, or what an ethical reading process might look like. Rather, I hope to open up a sense of the plenitude of possible ethical approaches to reading. While there will continue to be considerable back and forth between the ethical claims of universalism and particularism, and an ongoing tension between difference and similitude, knowing and unknowing in the interpretation of literary texts, it is worth paying attention to the multiple ways that a text can be read – even by the same reader – and the ways in which these processes can challenge and rearticulate the 177

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boundaries between selves and others, texts and worlds. There is no easy answer to the question of how to read ethically.

Works Cited Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2004. Clarke, Robert, and Marguerite Nolan. ‘Book Clubs and Reconciliation: A Pilot Study on Book Clubs Reading the Fictions of Reconciliation.’ Australian Humanities Review 56 (2014): 121–140. Davis, Kimberly Chabot. ‘Oprah’s Book Club and the Politics of Cross-Racial Empathy.’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.4 (2004): 399–419. ———. ‘White Book Clubs and African American Literature: The Promise and Limitations of Cross-Racial Empathy.’ LIT 19.2 (2008): 155–186. Devlin-Glass, Frances. ‘More Than a Reader and Less Than a Critic: Literary Authority and Women’s Book Discussion Groups.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 24.5 (2001): 571–585. Diamond, Elin. ‘Rethinking Identification: Kennedy, Freud, Brecht.’ Kenyon Review 15.2 (1993): 86–99. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Chichester: Blackwell, 2008. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995. Griswold, Wendy. Regionalism and the Reading Class. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2008. Guillory, John. ‘The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading.’ The Turn to Ethics. Ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. New York: Routledge, 2000. 29–46. Hartley, Jenny. The Reading Groups Book. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End, 1999. Howie, Linsey. ‘Speaking Subjects: Developing Identities in Women’s Reading Communities.’ Rehberg Sedo, Reading Communities. 140–158. Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony. Like Nothing on the Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt. Perth, UWAP, 2017. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Kiernan, Anna. ‘The Growth of Reading Groups as a Feminine Leisure Pursuit: Cultural Democracy or Dumbing Down.’ Rehberg Sedo, Reading Communities. 123–139. Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Use of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2003. Nolan, Maggie. ‘Reading Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance: Book Clubs and Postcolonial Literary Theory.’ JASAL 16.2 (2016). . ———. ‘Reading Massacre: Book Club Responses to Landscape of Farewell.’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 62.1 (2020): 73–96. Nolan, Maggie, and Robert Clarke. ‘Book Clubs, Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, and the Ordinary Reader.’ Australian Literary Studies 29.4 (2014): 19–35. Nolan, Maggie, and Janeese Henaway, ‘Decolonising Reading: The Murri Book Club.’ Continuum 31.6 (2017). 791–801. Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Procter, James, and Bethan Benwell. Reading across Worlds: Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Ravenscroft, Alison. The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race. New York: Routledge, 2012. Rehberg Sedo, DeNel. ‘An Introduction to Reading Communities: Processes and Formations.’ Rehberg Sedo, Reading Communities. 1–24. ———, ed. Reading Communities: From Salons to Cyberspace. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Sommer, Doris. ‘Resistant Texts and Incompetent Readers.’ Poetics Today 15.4 (1994): 523–551.

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Australian Literature and the World

19 NEWS FROM AUSTRALIA Global Modernism Studies and the Case of Australian Modernism Melinda J. Cooper News from Australia In 1946, the newly appointed consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, Karl Shapiro, published a poem titled ‘News to Australia’ in America’s New Republic and Australia’s Meanjin. He dedicated the poem to the Australian novelist Eleanor Dark and her husband Eric. Shapiro had met the Darks in 1942, when he visited their Katoomba home while serving at an army hospital in the Blue Mountains. The three formed a firm friendship and continued to correspond when Shapiro was stationed in New Guinea and on his subsequent return to the United States. In ‘News to Australia,’ Shapiro addresses the Darks from America: ‘I do not wish you were here,’ as ‘Australia may be better, / The farther the better’ (lines 30, 32–33). The final stanza praises Australia’s cultural isolation at a time of global crisis: I pray that Australia remain at the periphery Of the Western Problem, learn to diminish pace, Receive our events through bad communications, Misunderstand us, learn from us less. Where the signs of heaven and earth are reversed And the seasons opposite to English literature, Different from the mouthings of many poets, The fauna the property of another era, The natives with the longest memory of time; May distance forbid the tourist, the salesman, The screaming comedian, the book of the week, The shine of accessories that rusts the man. Remaining palpable and small of growth With interior thought that fingers the unknown, Befriend your insularity, be far, Hug the antipodes, survive. (lines 127–142)

Shapiro provides a striking example of what Paul Giles refers to as ‘the trope of inversion’: an image of the global South as a world in reverse, frequently used by writers in the Northern Hemisphere to represent Australia (Antipodean 26). According to Shapiro, Australia is both temporally belated – belonging to ‘another era’ – and geographically ‘far’ from the north. In a somewhat backhanded compliment, Shapiro frames these antipodal images positively, suggesting that Australia’s ‘distance’ from the perceived world centre and its ‘reversed’ perspective might offer it protection from the dangers he associates with the mid-century period: nuclear fallout, the aftermath

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of the Holocaust, and the mediocrity and invasiveness of American mass culture. Hence Shapiro’s advice to his Australian friends is to ‘[b]efriend your insularity’ and ‘[h]ug the antipodes, survive.’ While attempting to frame Australia in positive terms, Shapiro’s poem nonetheless reinforces a set of spatial and temporal relations that place Australia at the world’s periphery and Europe and America at its centre. Scholars who have participated in the ‘transnational turn’ in literary and historical studies of the past two decades provide a strong challenge to such terms and to the diffusionist narrative of cultural change that underpins it. In a diffusionist account, ‘modernity is first invented in the metropolitan centre and then exported to the colonial peripheries, which are always, by definition, belated’ (Dixon, Photography xxiii). As critics within the ‘new modernism’ studies point out, the centre/periphery model reinforces a set of binary relations that presume ‘a unidirectional flow of power and the abjection of the colonised’ (Friedman, ‘World Modernisms’ 515). In contrast, a circulation model, which draws attention to sites of interaction and connection, affirms the presence of ‘multiple agencies, centres, and conjunctures around the world’ (Friedman, ‘Planetarity’ 493). Once we reinvestigate mid-century Australia from a transnational paradigm, we see that it was not constituted by Shapiro’s terms of ‘distance,’ ‘insularity,’ and belatedness, but by forms of contact, mobility and contemporaneity. Even Shapiro’s poem is the product of a profound moment of multi-directional cultural exchange. His description of Australia as a place where the ‘natives’ have ‘the longest memory of time’ is surely a reference to Eleanor Dark’s novel, The Timeless Land (1941), which Shapiro praised in his letters from New Guinea, describing it to Eric as ‘my favourite Australian book’ (Letter to Eric Dark, 15 Nov. 1943), and telling Eleanor that it ‘had left a wonderful flavor [sic] with me’ (Letter to Eleanor Dark, 7 Jun. 1943).1 By the time ‘News to Australia’ was published, The Timeless Land had already been selected for the American Book-of-the-Month Club, an institution that significantly shaped mainstream book culture in America – and the tastes and purchasing habits of Australian readers – and which brought Dark the highest sales of her career (see Carter and Osborne 262–270). Australia was far from a peripheral influence on Shapiro’s work, either. One of his wartime poetry collections was published in Melbourne, and he recalled assembling another in the living room of Varuna, the Darks’ home in Katoomba (Letter to Eleanor Dark, 1 Aug. 1944). His Pulitzer-winning collection, V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), contains titles such as ‘Hill at Parramatta,’ ‘Sydney Bridge,’ and ‘Christmas Eve: Australia.’ This cultural influence worked in the other direction as well: in her subsequent novel The Little Company (1945), Dark included a dashing American GI character that was probably based on Shapiro (Brooks with Clark 257). As these instances of mutual influence suggest, the cultural exchange between Dark and Shapiro operated in both directions: his ‘News to Australia’ was also constituted by news from Australia, mediated through the traffic of letters to and from Australia, the Asia-Pacific, and the United States. It is clear that Shapiro’s antipodal images of Australia as upside-down and a step behind functioned as ‘an imaginary rather than a historical conception, one dependent more upon a mystique of the land than on any social realities associated with it’ (Giles, Antipodean 24). Yet such an imaginary can also prove to be productive, particularly when wielded by subjects from socalled ‘antipodal’ locations. We might consider how the seemingly ‘reversed’ perspectives of such contexts as Australia speak powerfully to disciplinary fields centred in the north. Jacob Edmond writes of the modernism of Aotearoa New Zealand as having the potential to turn ‘modernist studies upside down,’ in part because of the ‘insider-outsider’ status of this settler-colonial nation: it is both part of Western culture, and geographically and culturally removed from centres of power in the north. How can the Australian situation, with its perceived cultural and geographical isolation, provide a similar sense of ‘critical distance’ from the terms of reference often used to understand concepts such as modernism and modernity within global modernism studies – a field that, despite its broad aims, remains institutionally located in the Northern Hemisphere? What kind of news from Australia is offered by the case of Australian modernism to the more powerful disciplinary fields of world literature and the new modernism studies? 182

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‘New Modernism’ Studies and Australian Literature One of the major developments in literary studies of the past two decades is the resurgence of interest in the discursive fields of both modernism and modernity. In some important critical interventions, proponents of the ‘new modernism’ studies call for a number of ‘expansions’ to the geographical, temporal, and stylistic definitions of modernism (Mao and Walkowitz 737). Owing to this, we are now much more likely to think of multiple modernisms engaging with diverse experiences of modernity rather than a single European modernist canon. Drawing on a transnational paradigm, Susan Stanford Friedman proposes a ‘polycentric model of global modernities and modernisms based on circular or multidirectional rather than linear flows’ of cultural movement, arguing that ‘modernities and their modernisms develop not in isolation but always relationally through encounters with other societies and civilisations, encounters which are transcultural, not unidirectional’ (‘Planetarity’ 482; ‘World Modernisms’ 511). Jessica Berman similarly emphasises ‘the importance of conceiving of modernism as a mode of writing that arises in many forms, guises, and locations in response to the social, political, and aesthetic developments of modernity’ (149). In many ways, Australian modernism provides an excellent case study to demonstrate some of the key developments of the new modernism studies of the past few decades. As global modernist scholars have expanded the geographical borders of the field to encompass cultural products produced in a range of locales beyond the traditional sites of England, Europe, and America, scholars working in Australian literary studies have similarly recognised Australian modernism as one local manifestation of a transnational phenomenon. If we take the reception of Dark’s writing as an example, we can see that over the past two decades scholars have compared her work to the modernisms produced in such diverse geographical contexts as England, America, Aotearoa New Zealand, and China (see Gildersleeve; Giles, Backgazing; Scott; Ailwood; Carson, ‘Paris and Beyond’; Carson, ‘From Sydney and Shanghai’). Such readings reveal Australia as part of a ‘network of relations’ rather than the recipient of a ‘one-way transfer of culture and authority’ from the north (Dixon, Photography xxiv). Another important implication of global modernism studies is the expansion of the temporal boundaries of the field. As critics have shown, the traditional periodisation of modernism as beginning in the late nineteenth century and ending in 1945 excludes the emerging modernisms and modernities of countries that were on the cusp of independence at this time (Friedman, ‘Periodising Modernism’ 427; Doyle and Winkiel, ‘Introduction’ 7). In an attempt to remedy this, Friedman reframes the term ‘modernity’ from its traditional association with Western processes of Enlightenment to ‘the temporal rupture of before/after wherever and whenever such ruptures might occur in time and space,’ with modernism redefined as ‘the expressive dimension’ of these multiple modernities (‘Periodising’ 432–433; original emphasis). A more relaxed approach to modernism’s temporal boundaries makes sense in the Australian context, where some of the most experimental twentieth-century writers were those of the post-war period: writers such as Patrick White and Dorothy Hewett are representative of an Australian aesthetic modernism centred in the post-war period (see Varney and D’Urso). Although a number of Australian writers experimented with recognisably modernist literary devices prior to 1945, including Dark, Kenneth Slessor, and Christina Stead, a strict cut-off date at the end of the Second World War overlooks the fact that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, there was still a very limited Australian publishing industry. Furthermore, the expansion of the temporal definitions of aesthetic modernism is important for the recognition of Indigenous Australian literary and artistic modernisms. For example, the landscape paintings of Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira can be read as part of a transnational phenomenon of ‘mid twentieth-century pastoral modernism’ in which artists combined avant-garde artistic practices with the more romantic modes of pastoralism and the picturesque (McLean 190). Similarly, if we understand modernism in the broader sense as the creative expression of modernity – ‘one that encompasses a range of styles among creative forms that share family 183

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resemblances based on an engagement with the historical conditions of modernity in a particular location’ (Friedman, ‘Periodising’ 432) – then a number of other works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and artists can be included in its scope, including the experimental novels of contemporary authors Kim Scott and Alexis Wright. The ‘vertical’ expansion of modernism to encompass a greater range of aesthetic styles and tastes also speaks well to the Australian situation, where avant-garde modernism often mixed with both middlebrow and mass forms of culture. As David Carter shows, Australia’s relative lack of elite cultural institutions such as university presses meant that interwar writers often needed to publish in ‘the middlebrow, commercial domain’ rather than in the realm of high culture (‘Modernity’ 143). Major Australian writers of the 1930s such as Dark, Marjorie Barnard, Miles Franklin, Vance Palmer, and Katharine Susannah Prichard all published extensively in commercial publications such as newspapers and magazines, so that their work was ‘located institutionally on the cusp of highbrow and middlebrow’ (143). Equally, the idea that modernism could encompass elements of mass popular culture has proven to be important for the Australian context: it has opened up Australian modernist studies to a wider range of texts, including magazines, popular novels, and commercial cinema, and illuminated important connections between mass culture and the work of ‘literary’ authors. Philip Mead draws attention to the influence of Slessor’s role as film critic for Smith’s Weekly on his modernist representation of time and memory, finding ‘deep analogies between the structures and themes of literary modernism and the new aesthetics of the cinema’ (72, 85). The modernist narrative style that Dark developed in her 1930s novels also evokes the cinematic techniques she observed in Hollywood cinema, including flashbacks, close ups, and cross-cuts between scenes, and embraces changing forms of visual perception, speed, and mobility produced by new technologies such as motor travel and photography (see Cooper). Although the entanglement between modernism, the middlebrow, and commercial culture is not entirely unique to Australia, these modes combined readily in this locale (Dixon and Kelly xxx). A similar conjunction between modernism, mass culture, and the middlebrow can be seen in the field of Australian visual arts. In interwar Australia, there was some resistance to modernist abstraction in the realm of high art; however, in the commercial sphere, retailers, department stores, advertisers, and middlebrow periodicals such as The Home (1920–1942) and Art in Australia (1916–1942) were ‘among the earliest to turn modern’ (Stephen, McNamara and Goad 4). Australian modernist photographers of the 1930s, including Olive Cotton and Max Dupain, often employed experimental photographic techniques to produce work for advertising campaigns related to architecture, fashion, and home appliances (Crombie 135–137). The Australian public was much more likely to encounter artistic modernism through such advertisements and illustrations than the high modernist art shown in gallery exhibitions and art schools, giving Australian artistic modernism a particularly commercial flavour (Ennis 82). Studies of Australian modernism have also benefited from recent theorisations of what it means to balance local, national, and global commitments. Traditionally, there has been a ‘powerful and well-rehearsed narrative about modernism [which] defines it as essentially metropolitan and internationalist in character’ – a narrative that is underpinned by the assumption that a writer who is truly cosmopolitan will express detachment from local and national place (Alexander and Moran 1). Recent scholarship has sought to modify the meaning of cosmopolitanism from a sense of detached universalism to what Rebecca L. Walkowitz describes as ‘multiple or flexible attachments’ (9; original emphasis). A more flexible and dialectical cosmopolitanism challenges the idea that writers who are ‘committed to a region and to developing its national consciousness must turn away from the world’ (Walkowitz 2; see also Appiah; Berman; Clifford). As such, it offers a crucial development for the study of Australian modernism, which comprises texts that often ‘included a stronger component of regionalism and special attention to landscape than was commonly accepted as “characteristic” of European modernism’ (Carson, ‘Spun’ 421). In Australian 184

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literature, modernism and nationalism were not ‘opposite traditions’ but rather ‘mutually enabled’ each other, fusing together in complex and interesting ways (Smith, ‘Local Moderns’ 8–9). This realisation has helped to challenge the binary between cosmopolitan modernism and cultural nationalism that has often functioned in accounts of twentieth-century Australian literature. Scholars have reinvestigated Australian writers who were traditionally viewed as provincially minded cultural nationalists, such as the Jindyworobak poets and Vance and Nettie Palmer, instead finding that they often balanced nationalist commitments with internationalist, cosmopolitan, and modernist ones (see Dixon, ‘Home’; Jordan; Kirkpatrick; Smith, ‘Local Moderns’; ‘Remapping’). As Deborah Jordan writes, ‘our understanding of literary modernism allows us to reconfigure the so called “cultural nationalists” in a more cosmopolitan frame, and allows them to take their place as Australians engaging in and appropriating transnational modernisms’ (146).

The Case of Australian Modernism As this discussion suggests, recent expansions in global modernism studies have had significant effects on the study of Australian modernism: increasing the number of authors and texts we can consider as modernist; allowing for useful comparisons to be made between the work of Australian authors and those of other locales; and challenging the binary between cosmopolitan modernism and cultural nationalism. But does Australian modernism only provide an exemplary case of global modernism’s temporal, geographical, and aesthetic expansions, or does it offer more than this? Australian modernism can point to some of the problems, blind spots, and elisions of expanded theorisations of modernism. This is apparent at the level of language. To explain the process by which ‘modernist practices travel and migrate across nations and are, in turn, transformed by encounters with indigenous national cultures’ (Brooker and Thacker, ‘Introduction’ 4), Friedman uses the term ‘indigenisation’ – ‘a form of making native or indigenous something from elsewhere,’ by which ‘the practices that take hold in their new location are changed’ (‘Periodising’ 430–431; original emphasis). Yet this kind of language poses a problem for scholars working in settlercolonial contexts such as Australia. What does it mean for experimental literary practices to move across borders and become ‘indigenised’ or naturalised in territory that is already contested? It would be highly problematic to label the writings of settler Australian writers as Indigenous modernisms; such language overlooks the particular structural complexities of a settler-colonial society. Equally, the term ‘expansion,’ which Douglas Mao and Walkowitz use to champion the effects of the new modernism studies (737), shows a similar blindness to the ways in which the language of global modernism might emulate that of imperialism and invasion. It is not only a problem of language that is at issue here. Terms such as ‘indigenisation,’ as well as being problematic when applied to settler contexts, remain reactive: in giving priority to the imported agent, modernism remains something that arrives from elsewhere, even though it is eventually projected back to the centre in an altered form. A more multidirectional and decentred account would suggest that Australia produced its own distinct modernisms and modernities contemporaneously and in dialogue with those formed elsewhere. Indeed, scholars working in Australian literary and cultural studies often go further than even the new modernism studies in stressing the active nature of peripheral modernities in negotiating local and global forms of culture. In doing so, they often shift the focus from avantgarde aesthetic modernism (however broadly defined) to engagements with modernity that encompass other modes and commitments such as historical fiction, middlebrow and popular forms of romance, socialist realism, or even anti-modernism, thus allowing us to ‘read the “modernity” of texts that are partly or even wholly resistant to modernism but engaged, nonetheless with their own contemporaneity’ (Carter, Always Almost x). For example, while the editors of the Australian art magazine Vision (1923–1924) expressed anti-modernist positions, they nonetheless occupied a position ‘within modernity’: they ‘knew their modernism better than anyone else in the country’ (Carter, Always Almost x, 6). 185

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As Erin Carlston, Matthew Haywood and Brian Reed suggest in their introduction to the recent special issue of Modernist Cultures on the modernisms of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Fiji, ‘some of the most interestingly modernist work of the Pacific region in the twentieth century is by people who explicitly described themselves as anti-modernist’ (271–272). This could be said of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, whose Ern Malley hoax is often cited as the representative example of Australian anti-modernism, but whose parody relied upon a strong understanding of surrealism and Dadaist experimentation. The concepts produced in the metropolitan centres of modernism studies can be modified and made more nuanced by coming into contact with the complexities of a settler-colonial situation. In some instances, the Australian case might even make us question the usefulness of the category of modernism. For example, although the idea of ‘Indigenous modernisms’ can illuminate the ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and artists negotiated both international and local forms of culture, it nonetheless risks making the primary term of engagement for their work one that is still linked with a Eurocentric context. The task of recovering Indigenous modernisms can produce a form of ‘catch-up modernism,’ in which art historians and literary critics attempt to ‘write each artist into a universal narrative of the shared evolution of modernism, the outline of which has been set by developments in EuroAmerica’ (Smith, ‘Rethinking’ 292). Understanding Aboriginal cultural products as modernist might lead to significant misreadings of these texts, as Mununjali writer Ellen van Neerven suggests is the case when critics misunderstand the works of contemporary Indigenous authors as ‘magic realism’ (qtd in Menzies-Pike). Indigenous artists and writers often responded to colonialism by seeking to reinvigorate threatened native traditions, so that ‘to be modern might mean a return to or a continuation of realist/naturalist modes of expression, rather than a turn toward abstraction’ (Harney and Phillips 2). Namatjira’s work demonstrates this point: although his paintings can be linked with Western artistic modernisms such as those of Picasso or Gauguin, they can also be understood as an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty, and read in relation to a long and continuous tradition of Aboriginal representations of and care for Country (see Burn and Stephen). Similarly, Namatjira’s watercolours can be interpreted as a local response to the cultural and political struggles experienced by the Western Arrernte at the Hermannsburg Mission (McLean 196). As Ian McLean proposes, a ‘more useful way of understanding the impetus behind Namatjira’s art might be to consider it in the context of Western Arrernte history rather than that of Western modernism … What if his paintings were a response to local Arrernte politics rather than either a mimicry or subversion of Western modernism?’ (195). At best, the category of Indigenous modernism offers only one lens through which to understand Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander texts, and the meanings of the term remain highly contested. Other, perhaps more useful methodologies include trans-Indigenous literary studies – a form of comparison that brings the cultural products of Indigenous writers and artists from diverse geographical contexts into dialogue with one another, thereby challenging the notion that Western terms of reference must always serve as the basis of comparison (see Allen; Te Punga Somerville).

Settler-Colonial Modernisms One of the key ways in which Australian modernism presents a challenge to global modernism studies is by pointing to the distinctiveness of the settler-colonial situation. Key proponents of settler colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, assert that countries such as Australia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand are not postcolonial in the sense that colonisation occurred there as a past ‘event’ but are structurally differently to either colonised or decolonised contexts (Wolfe 163; Veracini, ‘Introducing’ 1–5). Just as settler colonialism is not the same as colonialism, so I suggest that the modernisms produced in these contexts do not map entirely to the modernisms produced in either metropolitan or decolonised contexts. 186

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Global modernism studies currently lack the language to conceive of settler-colonial modernisms as ones that are both linked to, and yet distinct from, the modernisms produced in other locations. Yet understanding Australian modernism in relation to settler colonialism helps to make sense of a number of key aspects of mid-century Australian culture. For example, it helps to clarify the fascination that settler Australian writers and artists often showed for Aboriginal forms of culture. A number of examples could be cited to support this tendency, including Margaret Preston’s modernist paintings, which make frequent use of motifs and colours from Aboriginal art to represent modern subjects, or the poetry of the Jindyworobaks. The attention these settler Australian artists and writers paid to Aboriginal culture could be read as a form of modernist primitivism; however, it also had particular and local meanings specific to a settler-colonial context – meanings that are elided if we read these texts only in terms of modernist primitivism. The complexity of settler modernist depictions of Aboriginal culture is displayed in a passage from Dark’s novel Waterway (1938). In its one-day time frame and multi-perspectival form of narration, Waterway resonates strongly with key novels of Anglo-Irish modernism, including Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In the opening scene, the doctor Oliver Denning gazes at Sydney Harbour and imagines watching the arrival of the First Fleet from the point of view of an Eora man. In his mind’s eye, the Sydney of 1938 – the year of the Sesquicentenary – dissolves into the ‘timeless,’ pre-colonial landscape: It was as quiet now, Oliver thought, as it must have been on the dawn on that day a hundred and fifty years ago which had marked the end of its primeval solitude. Now, with the aid of dim light, narrowed eyes, and a little imagination, you could annihilate the city, the growth whose parent cells had fastened upon the land that day. You could become a different kind of man, tall and deep-chested, black-skinned and bearded, standing upon some rocky peak with the dawn wind on your naked body, your shield and spear and throwing-stick in your hands. It was this same place that you saw, this pale, flat water between dark headlands; but the headlands were not Blue’s Point and Potts Point, Longnose Point and Slaughter-house Point. They were Warringarea and Yarranabbe, Yeroulbine and Tarrah. Far along that slowly brightening waterway you could see a little island, dark in the middle of its silver path – not Pinchgut, where miserable convicts suffered or hung in chains … but a lovely soaring column of weather-worn rock, holy place of your people – Mattewaya … The light was stronger now ... You could see the dome of the Zoo on the opposite hillcrest, and the great, ghostly arc of the bridge. Your moment of wilful mysticism, your plunge back into a savage body and an inviolate land were over, and you were Oliver Denning, doctor of medicine, on your way to a job. (11–12) Like many Western artists and writers at the time, Dark shows a fascination with the primitive and the mythic, displaying what Bonnie Kime Scott describes as a modernist ‘openness to cultures’ (26). As in other examples of modernist primitivism, such as D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1925) or Prichard’s Coonardoo (1928), Dark approaches native culture as a source of renewal, using it to provide a ‘fundamental critique of bourgeois civilization and its ideology of progress’ that nonetheless relies upon a binary between the primitive and the modern (Huyssen 7). The injunction to ‘become a different kind of man’ and feel ‘the dawn wind on your naked body’ invites the modern reader to participate in a more vital, embodied and ‘savage’ existence. Through the modernist slippage between past and present, Oliver and the reader are able to ‘annihilate the city’ and escape the complexities of modernity, so that icons of the modern city such as the Harbour Bridge are rendered ‘ghostly.’ We do, however, need to exercise caution in applying terms from metropolitan modernism to the work of a writer operating within a settler context. The modernist primitivism associated 187

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with art and literature produced in the 1920s and 1930s by those within European, metropolitan culture is understood as ‘a psychoanalytically influenced Western elite practice in which artists treat “natives” and native cultures as sources of rejuvenation in a rapidly modernising world’ (Chu 171). But what did it mean to express a fascination with the primitive in a place of ‘unsettled settlers’ (Matthews 9), where settler culture was situated tenuously between the metropolitan colonial powers and the Indigenous peoples whose very existence disturbed settler claims to belonging? Settler colonialism is structured by an ongoing and triangular system of relationships involving settler, metropolitan, and Indigenous agencies (Veracini, Settler Colonialism 21); because of this, settler Australian appropriations of Aboriginal culture are more complex than explanations of modernist primitivism allow. This complexity can be seen in an editorial from a 1924 issue of Art in Australia. The issue featured striking photographs of masks and carvings from the Pacific Islands. In their editorial, Sydney Ure Smith and Leon Gellert assert the importance of ‘native’ designs to the development of Australian modern art: The art of the Pacific Islander, like all Eastern art, is never realistic in the application of form to design. In this respect it has every advantage over our own arts and crafts, which appear commonplace by comparison. Art ornamentation in Europe is already showing the strong influence of these ‘native’ art forms, but the simple Australian aboriginal designs of which our museums have many examples are as yet unexploited by the Western craftsman. They will not remain in hiding for long when once their value is appreciated by the visitor from abroad. Mrs Margaret Preston … has written briefly about the opportunities afforded by aboriginal art and of its application to modern design … To the unsophisticated this resort to the primitive races may appear undignified, but to those who have realised the enormous difficulty experienced by the civilised mind in simplifying and conventionalising form, the work of these peoples comes as a new and necessary stimulus. [The] ornamental designs by various tribes of Australian natives … may be employed and developed by art-craftsmen in the same way as native designs from New Guinea and Java have been taken and developed by France and America. As in other examples of modernist primitivist discourse, in this editorial Ure Smith and Gellert express admiration for the art forms they describe as ‘primitive,’ while at the same time relegating Pacific Islander and Aboriginal cultures to the past by suggesting that their designs can be accessed through ‘museums.’ It is an instance of what Johannes Fabian calls the ‘denial of coevalness,’ wherein there is ‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present’ (31). Yet a third category also emerges in this passage in addition to metropolitan and Indigenous cultures: it is Australian settler culture, which appears here as both anxious about its cultural belatedness in relation to Europe, and keen to establish itself as modern. Ure Smith and Gellert point out that artists in Europe and America have ‘already’ embraced native designs, whereas artists in Australia – where there is an abundance of such designs – are yet to discover their significance. There is anxiety that these designs will be discovered by ‘the visitor from abroad’ if Australian artists do not follow the example of Preston in appreciating ‘the opportunities afforded by aboriginal art and of its application to modern design.’ We see here what Carter describes as the paradoxical ideas of cultural belatedness and Australia’s essential modernity: proclaiming ‘Australia’s modernity and lack of modernity in the one breath’ (Always Almost 2–3). The passage from Waterway similarly expresses a settler form of modernist primitivism wherein native cultures are invoked for different purposes to those in metropolitan instances (although nonetheless still in appropriative ways). Dark collapses the temporal modes of past and present in order to critique the corrupt aspects of modernity she associates with British culture: the ‘parent cells’ that created the malignant ‘growth’ that is modern Sydney. It is this corrupt British imperialism that hitherto turned ‘a lovely soaring column of weather-worn rock’ into a prison ‘where miserable convicts suffered or hung 188

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in chains.’ In seeking to return to a time when Pinchgut was ‘holy place of your people – Mattewaya,’ Dark articulates a form of resistant nationalism that, paradoxically, reaches for Aboriginal culture to express both settler culture’s difference from England and its claims to cultural legitimacy. As Ellen Smith shows, settler fantasies of belonging were often expressed through a paradoxical identification with ‘the Aboriginal figure and her unquestioned claim to be born of the land’ (‘White Aborigines’ 104). The modernist primitivism shown in Waterway could therefore be read as an expression of a particular regional, settler-nationalist desire for settler indigenisation, as Oliver is seamlessly transformed into a member of Indigenous culture, invested with all of its cultural legitimacy, and then – crucially – returned to the present in a move that places Indigenous culture in the distant past. In this sense, Waterway gives modernist expression to a problem that is intrinsically part of the settler condition: ‘how to become indigenous, without becoming, or being able to become, Indigenous’ (Tout 76). Dark’s novel exemplifies how modernist modes were able to fuse with settler-nationalist claims in the Australian literary scene. Australian writers were not simply mimicking European modernists but rather producing and adapting experimental aesthetics to express regional concerns relevant to settler-colonial modernity. Reading Australian literature in light of the complex conditions of settler colonialism also helps to explain the prevalence of anti-modernist positions in mid-century Australia. For many settler Australian writers, to be modernist was to be associated with British imperialism and reject national forms of culture. Writers such as Franklin distanced herself from British literary modernism for precisely these reasons; she criticised Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) by calling it ‘Seven Poor Men of Bloomsbury … because of Sydney being presented in terms of the Bloomsbury coteries’ (172). In his influential essay, The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self-Respect (1936), P.R. Stephensen cited Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Brave New World (1932) as works of ‘decadence’ and ‘ultra-sophistication’ that represented Britain’s ‘culture of decline’ (55). These criticisms appear somewhat contradictory given that Stephensen was responsible for publishing an uncensored, secret edition of Lawrence’s novel in London in 1930, and had featured works by Aldous Huxley in his periodical the London Aphrodite (Moore 99, 109–110). It suggests that what was really at issue here was the desire to distinguish Australian literary culture from that of Britain, rather than a rejection of literary modernism per se. Similarly, Dark’s criticisms of Lawrence’s Australia-based novel Kangaroo (1923) as ‘one long, tormented effort to see’ appear to be less an attack on his modernism than a settler-nationalist claim that ‘native-born’ Australian writers could represent their own environment with greater aptitude and authenticity than could an ‘outsider’ (Dark, Australia 13).

Conclusions and Provocations We began this discussion with an example of mutual exchange between two mid-century American and Australian writers. Although Shapiro and Dark contributed to each other’s work in some powerful ways, they did not come from cultural contexts that shared equal power relations: the ‘news’ that Dark was able to share with the world as a woman writer from a semi-peripheral location was not always perceived with the same level of cultural value as might be attributed to a figure like Shapiro. In a similar way, Australian literary studies might be said to exist in a contemporaneous but asymmetrical relationship with the more powerful disciplines of global modernism studies and world literature: while the Australian context has some significant things to say to these larger fields, it is sometimes difficult for this news to be heard. In this chapter, I have suggested that one of the most important insights that scholars of Australian modernism can offer to the new modernism studies is an examination of how the modernisms of Australian writers and artists intersect with the conditions of settler colonialism. There are a number of challenges that await the theorisation of settler-colonial modernisms. One is the difficulty of working across the two asynchronous but linked literary traditions of settler and 189

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Indigenous writing – traditions that reflect cultures that are heterogeneous rather than uniform (see Rowse). This is made more complicated by the definitional question of the usefulness – or lack thereof – of the term ‘modernism’ for approaching Aboriginal writing and art. A comparative theory of settler-colonial modernisms must also attempt to draw links across such diverse geographical and cultural contexts as Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. Furthermore, it must avoid an overly deterministic account of settler modernist texts as only the expression of settler-colonial desires. Often, modernist aesthetics helped to reinforce settler desires for cultural legitimacy, such as when an experimental approach to time facilitated the depiction of Aboriginal people as ‘outside’ of time and thus supported ideas of primitivism and the disenfranchisement of Aboriginal land rights. Any exploration of settler modernist texts must account for the ways in which such representations continue to ‘weigh heavily on contemporary Indigenous life’ (Griffiths 11). At other times, however, experimental modernist aesthetics allowed settler writers to challenge some of the ideas that underpinned the modern settler nation, even if only in brief and provisional ways. In the second instalment of Dark’s historical trilogy, Storm of Time (1948), one character imagines a reversal of colonial history in which the first decades of British presence in Australia are rolled back: for a brief moment, Stephen Mannion imagines ‘a whole, frightening sequence of logic which set the events of 17 years into reverse, dissolved towns and houses and roads and cultivated fields into mist, and erased the white man like a figure from a slate’ (399). Here, Dark’s characteristically modernist approach towards temporality provides a striking image of the contingency and precarity of the settler- colonial project. Despite the challenges outlined above, I believe that a theorisation of settler-colonial modernism is important in ensuring that the historical and cultural specificities of Australian modernism (and those of other settler-colonial contexts) are not subsumed into a wider totality of ‘global modernism’ or miscategorised as postcolonial. This is not to say that settler-colonial modernisms cannot also be compared in useful ways with the modernisms produced in other contexts, but rather that each kind of comparison produces different and important effects. The idea of a settler-colonial modernism that is different from but linked in with other kinds of modernisms could help to illuminate the similarities between such seemingly diverse contexts as Australia and the United States. Scholars working in the United States do not always examine their own relationship to settler colonialism, in part because ‘colonialism’s dystopian emphasis on embedded power relations tends to run counter to a utopian rhetoric of agency and renewal that has traditionally driven the cognate fields of American literature and American studies’ (Giles, Antipodean 11). Australian literary studies could therefore help scholars in a northern locale to re-imagine their own situation through the critical distance of a seemingly ‘reversed’ perspective. In doing so, these critics may discover that the ‘news’ from Australia is not so ‘far’ or ‘opposite’ as was once imagined.

Note

Works Cited Ailwood, Sarah. ‘Anxious Beginnings: Mental Illness, Reproduction and Nation Building in “Prelude” and Prelude to Christopher.’ Katherine Mansfield Studies 2 (2010): 20–38. Alexander, Neal, and James Moran. ‘Introduction.’ Regional Modernisms. Ed. Neal Alexander and James Moran. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. 1–21. Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: WW Norton, 2006.

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Australian Modernism Berman, Jessica. ‘Toward a Regional Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Mulk Raj Anand.’ Modern Fiction Studies 55.1 (2009): 142–162. Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker. ‘Introduction.’ Brooker and Thacker, Geographies of Modernism. 1–5. ———, ed. Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces. New York: Routledge, 2005. Brooks, Barbara, with Judith Clark. Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life. Sydney, NSW: Pan Macmillan, 1998. Burn, Ian, and Ann Stephen. ‘Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial Interpretation.’ The Heritage of Namatjira: The Watercolorists of Central Australia. Ed. Jane Hardy, J.V.S. Megaw and M. Ruth Megaw. London: Heinemann, 1992. 249–282. Carlston, Erin G., Matthew Hayward, and Brian M. Reed. ‘Modernisms: Aotearoa New Zealand-AustraliaFiji, 1926–1986.’ Modernist Cultures 15.3 (2020): 263–275. Carson, Susan. ‘Paris and Beyond: The Transnational/National in the Writing of Christina Stead and Eleanor Dark.’ Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World. Ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott. Canberra, ACT: Australian National UP, 2008. 229–244. ———. ‘From Sydney and Shanghai: Australian and Chinese Women Writing Modernism.’ Pacific Rim Modernisms. Ed. Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword, and Steven Yao. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. 173–198. ———. ‘Spun from Four Horizons: Rewriting the Sydney Harbour Bridge.’ Journal of Australian Studies 33.4 (2009): 417–429. Carter, David. ‘Modernity and the Gendering of Middlebrow Book Culture in Australia.’ The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read. Ed. Kate Macdonald. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 135–149. ———. Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity. Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly, 2013. Carter, David, and Roger Osborne. Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s-1940s. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2018. Chu, Patricia E. ‘Modernist (Pre)Occupations: Haiti, Primitivism, and Anticolonial Nationalism.’ Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms. 170–186. Clifford, James. ‘Mixed Feelings.’ Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. 362–370. Cooper, Melinda J. ‘“Adjusted” Vision: Interwar Settler Modernism in Eleanor Dark’s Return to Coolami.’ Australian Literary Studies 33.2 (2018): 1–28. Crombie, Isobel. Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919–1939. Melbourne, VIC: Images/National Gallery of Victoria, 2004. Dark, Eleanor. Waterway. 1938. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1990. ———. ‘Australia and the Australians.’ Australia Week-End Book. 3rd ed. Ed. Sydney Ure Smith and Gwen Morton Spencer. Sydney, NSW: Ure Smith, 1944. 9–19. ———. Storm of Time. 1948. Sydney, NSW: HarperCollins, 2002. Dixon, Robert. ‘Home or Away? The Trope of Place in Australian Literary Criticism and Literary History.’ Westerly 54.1 (2009): 12–17. ———. Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronised Lecture Entertainments. New York: Anthem, 2013. Dixon, Robert, and Veronica Kelly. ‘Introduction.’ Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s. Ed. Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2008. xiii–xxiv. Doyle, Laura, and Laura A. Winkiel. ‘Introduction.’ Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms. 1–14. ———, ed. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Edmond, Jacob. ‘Do Look Down: Surveying the Field from Aotearoa/New Zealand.’ Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4.2. 14 Aug. 2019. . Ennis, Helen. Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion, 2007. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Franklin, Miles. Laughter, Not for a Cage: Notes on Australian Writing, with Biographical Emphasis on the Struggles, Function, and Achievements of the Novel in Three Half- Centuries. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1956. Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘Periodising Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.’ Modernism/modernity 13.33 (2006): 425–443. ———. ‘Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies.’ Modernism/modernity 17.3 (2010): 471–499. ———. ‘World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity.’ The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 499–525. Gildersleeve, Jessica. ‘Traumatic Cosmopolitanism: Eleanor Dark and the World at War.’ Hecate 41.1/2 (2016): 7–17.

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Melinda J. Cooper Giles, Paul. Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of US Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. ———, Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. Griffiths, Michael R. The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2018. Harney, Elizabeth, and Ruth B. Phillips. ‘Introduction: Inside Modernity: Indigeneity, Coloniality, Modernisms.’ Harney and Phillips, Mapping Modernisms. 1–30. ———, ed. Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2018. Huyssen, Andreas. ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalising World.’ Brooker and Thacker, Geographies of Modernism. 6–18. Jordan, Deborah. ‘“Elusive as the Fires That Generate New Forms and Methods of Expression in Every Age and Country”: Nettie Palmer and the Modernist Short Story.’ Hecate 35.1/2 (2009): 134–149. Kirkpatrick, Peter. ‘Jindy Modernist: The Jindyworobaks as Avant Garde.’ Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia. Ed. Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2012. 99–112. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. ‘The New Modernist Studies.’ PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737–748. Matthews, Jill Julius. Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 2005. McLean, Ian. ‘Modernism and the Art of Albert Namatjira.’ Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism. Ed. Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B Phillips. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2018. 187–208. Mead, Philip. Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry. Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly, 2008. Menzies-Pike, Catriona. ‘Writing, Editing: An Interview with Ellen van Neerven.’ Sydney Review of Books 23 Oct.  2015. . Moore, Nicole. The Censor’s Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia’s Banned Books. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2012. Rowse, Tim. ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity.’ Australian Historical Studies 45.3 (2014): 297–310. Scott, Bonnie Kime. ‘First Drafts for Transnational Women’s Writing: A Revisiting of the Modernisms of Woolf, West, Fauset and Dark.’ Hecate 35.1/2 (2009): 10–28. Shapiro, Karl. Letter to Eleanor Dark. 7 Jun. 1943. Eleanor Dark Collection. Varuna, The National Writers’ House. ———. Letter to Eric Dark. 15 Nov. 1943. Eleanor Dark Collection. Varuna, The National Writers’ House. ———. Letter to Eleanor Dark. 1 Aug. 1944. Eleanor Dark Collection. Varuna, The National Writers’ House. ———. ‘News to Australia.’ The New Republic 3 Jun. 1946: 808–809. Smith, Ellen. ‘Local Moderns: The Jindyworobak Movement and Australian Modernism.’ Australian Literary Studies 27.1 (2012): 1–17. ———. ‘White Aborigines: Xavier Herbert, P.R. Stephensen and the Publicist.’ Interventions 16.1 (2014): 97–116. ———. ‘Remapping Capricornia: Xavier Herbert’s Cosmopolitan Imagination.’ Cultural Studies Review 23.2 (2017): 126–140. Smith, Terry. ‘Rethinking Modernism and Modernity Now.’ Filozofski Vestnik 35.2 (2014): 271–319. Stephen, Ann, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad. ‘Introduction.’ Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917–1967. Ed. Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad. Carlton, VIC: Miegunyah, 2006. 1–27. Stephensen, P.R. The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self Respect. Gordon, NSW: W.J. Miles, 1936. Te Punga Somerville, Alice. ‘Searching for the Trans-Indigenous.’ Verge 4.2 (2018): 96–105. Tout, Dan. ‘Reframing “Inky” Stephensen’s Place in Australian Cultural History.’ Settler Colonial Studies 7.1 (2017): 72–93. Ure Smith, Sydney, and Leon Gellert. ‘Editorial.’ Art in Australia 10.1 (1924): n. pag. Varney, Denise, and Sandra D’Urso. ‘Patrick White and Aesthetic Modernism in Mid-Century Australia.’ Australasian Drama Studies 66 (2015): 63–80. Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. ‘Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies.’ Settler Colonial Studies 1.1 (2011): 1–12. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London: Cassell, 1999.

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20 HIJABI-BODIES AND SARTORIAL STRATEGIES Devaleena Das

Why Hijabi-Bodies? After the deadly massacre of 50 Muslims by a white Australian at two mosques in the city of Christchurch on 15 March 2019, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, garnered praise for wearing hijab as a symbol to honour the victims of the massacre and for exemplifying true leadership in guiding her country through grief in the wake of the mass shooting.1 In Sri Lanka, on Easter Sunday, 21 April 2019, the world witnessed massive suicide bombings at churches and hotels by nine Islamic extremists that left more than 300 people dead. To strengthen the national security of the country, Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena banned hijab, burqas, niqabs, and any other face coverings, effective from 29 April 2019, as per the nationwide Emergency Regulations. Immediately thereafter, Sri Lanka decided to ban face veils, and a debate for a similar ban, primarily led by right-wing political leaders, began in the neighbouring country of India. A few years prior, the Republic of Chad in Central Africa banned full-face veils when the Nigerian militant Islamist group Boko Haram used them to camouflage security forces and bombed more than 20 people. In 2019, Tunisia also banned face-covering veils in public institutions for security reasons. In the last 50 years, the act of veiling, unveiling, and re-veiling has taken a series of complex and conflicting religious, cultural, and political interpretations across the globe. In the post 9/11 era of national security, the headscarf has been reduced to a visible identifier of religious, racial, and ethnic groups. In August of 2017, Pauline Hanson, the leader of Australia’s right-wing One Nation party, entered the Senate chamber wearing a black burqa in order to call attention to the perceived threat that a burqa signifies and the necessity to ban the garment, primarily for national security concerns. The Australian Attorney General George Brandis called this act an offensive ‘stunt’ that aimed to ridicule the religious sensibilities of Australians who practise the Islamic faith (see ‘George Brandis’). Countries such as France, Germany, Turkey, Syria, Britain, Iran, Egypt, and Afghanistan have already witnessed conflicting discussions about veiling related to various issues including oppression, human rights, fashion statements, feminist agency, orientalism, Islamophobia, solidarity with Palestine, and resistance to Western imperialism. Harvard Professor Leila Ahmed, in her seminal work A Quiet Revolution (2011), captures this complex personal-political journey of the act of veiling that has evolved as a symbol of Islamic feminism and call for justice, as well as how this act represents the decolonisation of the Western interpretation of the veil as militant Islamic fanaticism. Why has the controversy around the hijab become exacerbated at national and international levels rather than been resolved? Why do writers, artists, 193

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political leaders, activists, and feminists join the discussion of hijab and its revival? Why has particularly hijab among all other attires taken the political space of conflicting voices? If a piece of cloth such as hijab has any connection to terrorism, why did we not pay equal attention to the attires of those who conduct racist violence including lynching, slavery, holocausts, and internment camps? More importantly, although it is true that a veil that hides one’s face makes it harder to identify a person in the security process, is there enough evidence to justify that most terrorist attackers have used hijab/burqa/veil to conduct terrorism? There appear to be no statistics justifying that burqas are overwhelmingly used to perform terrorist attacks, particularly when the majority of people arrested for terror offences are male, who could have used hijab to disguise themselves.2 On the contrary, there is enough evidence and existing scholarship to justify that female suicide bombers in countries such as Somalia, Uzbekistan, Palestine, Turkey, Israel, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Russia mostly abandon traditional attires such as burqa and hijab during surveillance of their bodies at the security checkpoints, so that they do not raise any suspicion among security officials. Any attire or even a naked body could be manipulated to perform terrorism, and therefore targeting one religious, cultural, or ethnic attire as the indicator of terrorism leads to further sensationalism, radicalism, and extremist oppositions between communities. To mark a hijabi-body as inherently violent is not only anecdotal, but becomes a tactic to fix its foreignness and integrational inability in hegemonic cultural values. In this chapter, I problematise the Australian-Muslim writer Randa Abdel-Fattah’s representation of hijabi-corporeality and sartorial strategies of standing apart culturally, religiously, sexually, and geopolitically in her novel Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005). I argue that the protagonist’s hijabi-corporeality is a metaphor for her rebellious gaze against the Western cultural imperialism of her diasporic Palestinian-Egyptian lineage. Comparing Abdel-Fattah’s novel to the Australian-American journalist Geraldine Brooks’s travelogue on the Middle East, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (1994), I explore further how at the crossroads of culture and identity both writers invoke their conflicting thoughts on hijabi-bodies as sites of struggles for multiple forms of power, resistance, and identity contestations. Abdel-Fattah’s text, I argue, opens up a space for a counterhegemonic resistance and anticolonial struggle through the hijabicorporeality while Brooks’s text attempts to theorise Islamic femininity as passive and conformist from a Eurocentric point of view.

Visible-Invisible Corporeality The novel Does My Head Look Big in This? describes Amal, a 16-year-old Muslim girl, and her negotiation of the fluidity of her complex identities in the racialised and gendered geopolitics of contemporary Australia. Amal decides to wear ‘full-time hijab’ (2) to embrace her Muslim heritage and create an activist awareness of her minority self. Her statement, ‘I’m an AustralianMuslim-Palestinian. That means I was born an Aussie and whacked with some seriously identity hyphens’ (6), is met with multiple reactions and challenges from family, friends, and people in the public. Amal’s mother Jamila, a dentist, has struggled with political and cultural conflicts herself because she has raised suspicions due to her hijabi-corporeality. Knowing the risk of her daughter’s decision to wear hijab, Jamila is nervous and proud at the same time, and she judiciously warns Amal about the possibilities of prejudice, discriminations, stereotypes, and intercultural conflicts: ‘With your veil, all eyes will be on you outside of school, so I trust you will not do our reputation any disservice’ (61). Amal’s school principal stereotypes Amal’s parents as orthodox Muslims, as she imagines how they must have forced their daughter to abandon the school uniform and wear hijab (38). Her schoolmates make fun of Amal as a non-pork-eating Mossie (taunting slang for Muslims), and ‘batting for Osama’s team’ (20); Amal thinks they reduce her hijabi-corporeality to a ‘biology specimen’ (35). Amal’s boyfriend confesses that he imagines her as ‘a pretty good-looking 194

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fanatic’ (148), and as Amal intends to apply for a job position, the shop manager replies: ‘The thing on your head, love, that’s what I mean. It’s not hygienic and it just don’t look good up at the front of the shop. Sorry, love. Try somewhere else’ (319). To hold onto her diasporic subjectivities in this hostile environment of reductive narratives, Amal’s act of veiling then becomes a repertoire of sartorial tactics to reject imposed dominant moral regiments. In the predominantly white, Eurocentric, metropolitan social milieu in Australia, this teenager’s adoption of hijab as an embodied act of political agency is a reflection of her unprecedented boldness, especially when she knows that this provocative covering is a politically stigmatised symbol. She realises that if she does not take on this role, her diasporic Muslim corporeality will be coded and structured into a biopolitical system of control, succumbing to what Shu-Mei Shih calls a ‘technology of recognition … that produce[s] “the West” as the agent of recognition and “the rest” as the object of recognition’ (17). Technologies of recognition involve mechanisms where the non-Western body is seen as passive, deprived of agency, and an ethnic subject to be coded with epistemic violence. It is this awareness that triggers Amal to see her corporeality as a source of alternative knowledge: ‘This rush of absolute power and conviction surged through me … I was ready to wear the hijab’ (Abdel-Fattah, Does My Head Look Big in This? 1–2). She expresses her political agency by refusing to allow her Muslim corporeality to be assimilated in the dominant culture. Amal’s Muslim female body usually incarnates urban invisibility for surrounding white bodies in Melbourne by constituting what is perceived as absolute otherness, but her hijab makes that body hyper-visible. On the one hand, she explains that her ‘passion and conviction in Islam are bursting’ such that she dares to subvert public stares at her ‘towel-head’ (7). On the other hand, as a teenager who is struggling with heteropatriarchal sexual objectification, she confesses that she is exhausted by the female body fetishism of cleavage, calves, hip ratios, and body size. AbdelFattah thus depicts Amal’s dilemma between the visibility of her budding teenage body and the invisibility of her religious identity at times when she is afraid to wear hijab because she is alone. Abdel-Fattah describes the precarious conditions of diasporic Australian-Muslim bodies and in the process hints at middle-class, white feminist exclusionary politics that often do not take into account the various strands of difference in the spectrum of feminist rebellion against the oppression and marginalisation of women. As a diasporic Muslim teenager, her interpersonal agency and engaged individualism exemplify her multiple positions at public places, work, school, and within her Muslim community and family gatherings. This designates diverse complementary and conflicting practices, pressures, and possibilities for political struggle and social transformation. Amal claims that her act of wearing the veil is a step towards ‘self-preservation’ (25), even though she is aware that veiling renders her body both powerful and vulnerable, elusive and transgressive. Mimi Thi Nguyen offers three important reflections on such sartorial politics: first, that clothes provide an indexical relationship between the body of the wearers and their existence in the world; second, that ‘clothes might provide an alibi for a racial, colonial optics as a surrogate for flesh’ and thereby ‘heighten anxieties about epistemic surety’; and third, that our immediate knowledge about a person from that attire is always limited (11). All of these reflections are applicable to Amal’s hijabi-corporeality. Her indexical relationship between her hijab and her surrounding is undeniable as she creates a visual spectacle for everyone regardless of class, race, education, gender, or social standing. The hijab also heightens Australians’ anxiety because it is a strategic tool and symbol of defiance in the Australian sociocultural context. At the same time, Amal’s hijab is an unforgettable visual: she sees it as a symbol of freedom and liberty, yet it does not hold similar meaning for others. If for Amal her hijab becomes a revolutionary fashion and the site for decolonising politics, paradoxically, it also allows dominant, white Australian power to locate her marginal position as colonial object. Amal’s impetus to make her hijabi-body visible against the structural denial and cultural invisibility of her Muslim identity that conditions her critical diasporic existence involves the politics of 195

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gaze, denial of gaze, and counter gaze. In the Western mainstream feminist theorisation of gaze, the primary focus has been on the male heterosexual gaze directed at the objectified female body. Laura Mulvey’s seminal work on visual pleasure defines gaze as a rational, voyeuristic, sadistic, controlling, and controlled power relationship. In the process, Mulvey’s theory of gaze ought to be considered as implying a universal pattern of meaning connected to gender and power dynamics in the world. Indeed, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), bell hooks coins the theory of ‘the oppositional gaze’ (115), and challenges Mulvey by reflecting on the political rebellion and resistance of black people, referring to alternative gazes such as interrogative and shared gazes. Moreover, in her collection of photographs entitled Women of Allah (1996), the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat captures what the West views as Middle-Eastern women’s submissive gaze and presents it as more complex and paradoxical. Neshat’s representation of the hijab-wearing women’s gaze in her photographs is not aimed at justifying a stereotypical orientalist representation of Muslim women. Rather, she pushes the viewer to think beyond orientalism or Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze by displaying the hardened rebellious and yet silent gaze of the women as a signifier of power to subvert all national and imperial oppressions. Similarly, Amal’s hijabi-clad body in Abdel-Fattah’s novel suggests that women’s empowerment can be expressed beyond the normative visibility of the body. For Amal, the best way to possess her individual self is to disengage from traditional white Australian representations of the body. She wants to be seen and visible, like her teenaged peers, but the centrality of this visibility must be through her legitimate assertion of hijabi-corporeality because for her being seen means being valued, appreciated, recognised, and integrated: ‘The hijab’s part of me,’ she says (Abdel-Fattah, Does My Head Look Big in This? 49). Amal represents a generation seeking an effective shift towards the acceptance of ethnic otherness: ‘Who cares what normal is, Simone? Let’s protest. From now on we’re the anti-normal, anti-average, anti-standard’ (83). Such collective political actions and awareness call attention to political transformative possibilities. In contrast to the appropriation and colonisation of cultural practices such as belly dance, mahendi, bindi, yoga, or sushi, the hijab is still mostly untouched by colonial modification primarily due to Islamophobia. For teenager Amal, the hijab is more than the discourse of modesty and an anticolonial consolidating political impulse that symbolises sisterhood: ‘These girls are strangers to me but I know that we all felt an amazing connection, a sense that this cloth binds us in some kind of universal sisterhood’ (28). Feminists including Joan Wallach Scott, Marnia Lazreg, Leila Ahmed, Afsana Najmabadi, and Fatema Mernissi have produced an impressive body of work on hijab and veiling in relation to sexual ideology, gender identity, Western gaze, and sociopolitical organisation. For instance, Scott argues that the French government’s institutional ban of headscarves in 2004 exemplifies an age-old Western myopic vision that shows how explicit openness to sexuality is the universal measure of women’s emancipation, which Muslim women fail to attain as citizens of France. The veil is thus more than a symbol of a distinct religion, community, and culture. In this larger context, it is also monopolised by Islamophobic people to ignite an anti-immigration sentiment and resist integration of the Muslim community with mainstream culture. As such, Amal’s precarity in constructing her personhood is demonstrated when her hijab is seen by her friends as a threat to Australian national security, while for some orthodox Muslims, such as her friend Leila’s mother, Gulchin, it is an assurance that Amal will not pursue a career, and thereby encourage Leila to settle down into an early arranged marriage. Abdel-Fattah explicates that Amal’s hijab belongs to Amal only, and the emotional, cultural, and religious meanings associated with it are subjected to Amal’s interpretations. As a result, Amal does not hesitate to point out that Gulchin violates the significance of her hijab, like many Australians, and that Gulchin, who has never read the Qur’an, misinterprets it, and has no knowledge about Islam. In reply, Gulchin exclaims: ‘I always thinking you a good girl. You wear hijab, you praying. You telling me I no know religion’ (312–313). Hijab is thus more than just a religious symbol: it becomes a 196

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way to create a new, activist subject position in order to refuse various boundaries that others try to create. Amal’s resistance to the reduction of her hijabi-body is an echo of her creator Abdel-Fattah. In an interview, the author conveys: I don’t think I ever identified as or even felt ‘Palestinian in Australia.’ Sometimes I felt a hybrid of Australian and Palestinian. Sometimes I felt neither Australian nor Palestinian, tired of identity politics. What was always present, however, was a sense that I was connected – personally and through a strong sense of principles – to an ongoing injustice and that raising awareness about it in Australia was an uphill battle. That was my political consciousness. As for my cultural consciousness, my mother is Egyptian and I grew up among her family in Australia and probably absorbed more Egyptian culture as a child. The older I get, the more I realise how hybridised my cultural identity is. (qtd in Handal) Like her creator, Amal’s negotiation of her hijabi-body in the midst of intolerance and ignorance is a counter-hegemonic narrative, and her hijab connotes her intelligibility. She is aware that educating white Australians on how to interpret the significance of her hijab from her point of view may not be achievable, but her active effort to dismantle social constructionism must be forged through her everyday existence. Édouard Glissant’s conceptualisation of transparency and opacity is meaningful in this context. According to Glissant, the essential imperative to transparency is convincing for the West because ‘other’ must be understood ‘from the perspective of Western thought’ which acts as ‘the ideal scale’; ‘In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments’ (190). For Glissant, this mechanism of comparison based on an ideal scale gives admission to the existence of the ‘other’ within the system but at the cost of reductionism and enclosure. To resist such powerless surrender to reductionism, Glissant suggests ‘the right to opacity’: ‘This is where I start. As for my identity, I’ll take care of that myself ’ (190–191). This is echoed in the words of Amal’s friend Eileen, who reminds Amal that ‘some people, like you, will probably have to fight the world to get where they want’ (Abdel-Fattah, Does My Head Look Big in This? 97–98). It is sometimes easy to accept transparency rather than opacity and instead avoid becoming the object of surveillance by assimilating into the dominant system. This is what Amal’s uncle envisions for a better future for Muslims in Australia: ‘According to his theory, in today’s climate Muslims are better off retreating and concealing their identity not only because they need to assimilate but also to get ahead in society’ (107). Amal could have easily fallen for this shallow solution, as she herself confesses: ‘I sometimes feel a strong temptation to retreat and to withdraw to the safety of anonymity. With the flick of a safety pin my hijab will fall off my head and I’ll look like an unhyphenated Aussie’ (107). However, her conscience pricks her differently, and she does not know what to name it: ‘Defiance? Anger? Pride? I can’t define it. Whether I choose to be an astronaut, a pilot, a lollipop lady, a scientist, or a Tupperware party host, this piece of material is coming with me’ (107). Glissant reminds us that we should not equate opacity to obscurity, futility, or inactivity (191); rather, opacity guarantees non-reductionism which Amal navigates through her hijabi-body to avoid assimilation and annihilation.

Hijab and Orientalist Feminism In contrast to the Australian geo-cultural backdrop in Does My Head Look Big In This?, the travelogue Nine Parts of Desire begins with a scene in Saudi Arabia in which Brooks reports about the Middle East for The Wall Street Journal. She struggles to convince a hotel manager to allow her inside her hotel room, prevented from venturing inside because she is not accompanied by a 197

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man: ‘I couldn’t check myself into a Saudi hotel room in the 1990s because thirteen hundred years earlier a Meccan named Muhammad had trouble with his wives’ (Brooks 3). Brooks’s narrative strategically uses this as the opening scene to substantiate her argument that hijab symbolises oppression. Her first Muslim woman colleague Sahar, The Wall Street Journal’s bureau assistant in Cairo, wears hijab, which Brooks thinks is nothing more than a ‘dowdy sack … the uniform of a Muslim fundamentalist’ (7). The symbolic construct of the opaque hijabi-body frustrates Brooks’s Western critical gaze, and therefore Sahar’s sartorial diligence and expression of her specific modes of subjectivity produce in her a sense of dislocation and alienation. Nine Parts of Desire describes Brooks’s ‘adventure’ of donning hijab and chador in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and the Arab Emirates without reflecting on how sartorial expressions as part of a repertoire of tactics are varied across geopolitical diversity. Her sense of cultural displacement in a majoritarian Middle-Eastern Muslim country, and the various cultural challenges she confronts, do not foster any awareness of the challenges experienced by her Muslim colleague Sahar must undergo in a white Australian Christian culture as she negotiates the dense disjunctive assemblages of everyday threats. On the contrary, Sahar’s decision to embrace the hijab is considered by Brooks to be compliant and suicidal, without understanding how Sahar’s displacement and the multivalent complexity of her belonging to her Muslim culture has found its expression in the act of embracing the hijab: The Islamic dress – hi jab – that Sahar had opted to wear in Egypt’s tormenting heat signified her acceptance of a legal code that valued her testimony at half the worth of a man’s, an inheritance system that allotted her half the legacy of her brother, a future domestic life in which her husband could beat her if she disobeyed him, make her share his attentions with three more wives, divorce her at whim and get absolute custody of her children. (8) In the narrative’s first chapter, ‘The Holy Veil,’ Brooks’s aim is to ‘get to the truth about hijab’ (32). She concludes that in Muslim societies, the problem lies with the female body: In the end, under all the concealing devices – the chador, jalabiya or abaya, the magneh, roosarie or shayla – was the body. And under all the talk about hijab freeing women from commercial or sexual exploitation, all the discussion of hijab’s potency as a political and revolutionary symbol of self hood, was the body: the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor. (32) The misogynist representation of the female body as dangerous, atavistic, despicable, impure, and fallen is not restricted to one culture or religion. In the Western European imagination, the female body was for a long time (indeed, still is) perceived as unclean, unpredictable, treacherous, and a source of evil and destruction. From Edward Jorden’s concept of the wandering womb proposed in The Suffocation of the Mother (1603), or the Shakespearean dictum ‘Frailty thy name is woman’ (207), to Emily Martin’s identification of the inherent sexism existing in medical books to describe human eggs as passive or treacherous, examples of demeaning female bodies in Western culture abound. Brooks’s claims about Australia’s ‘passionately tolerant secularism’ (Brooks 236) is a myopic oversimplification that demonstrates her Orientalist feminism that cannot be dissociated from Australia’s roots in the Euro-imperial and patriarchal subjectivity of the Enlightenment. She wonders if immigrant Muslim women in secular Australia might dare question the Qur’an and become atheists. Her strange and disturbing obsession with the tropology of hijab is a revelation of how the hijab exceeds sartorial symbolism and becomes, simply, ‘Oriental.’ Thus, for Brooks, the very ontology of the hijabi Muslim woman’s body constitutes an overdetermined differentiation between ‘my culture’ and ‘their culture’ (236). Brooks’s imaginary anchor mediated through 198

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Muslim women’s veiled bodies helps her claim the superiority of the West because in her unsolicited tirade she authoritatively argues that genital mutilation, honour killings, and three times talaq/divorce are not practised in Australia. Failing to see any transnational feminist solidarity between Middle-Eastern and Australian women, Brooks remains ignorant to the significance of hijabi-bodies’ resistance to imperialism. Travel writing is a rich genre with enormous scope to unravel different cultures of the world. It is also a way to disrupt power inequities that exist due to colonisation and imperialism, as exemplified by authors such as Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place (1989), June Jordan in ‘Report from the Bahamas’ (1989), and Colleen McEllroy in A Long Way from St Louie (1997). Brooks’s failure in her travel narrative is reflected in her inability to overcome orientalist tropes; therefore, her white subjectivity reinforces hierarchies of race, gender, and nationality. In contrast to Brooks’s actual travel, in Abdel-Fattah’s novel Amal undergoes a metaphorical journey in her resilient determination to wear the hijab, which operates as a trope for her attempt to recover Muslim women’s history through her own lived experience of her homeland in Australia and her ancestral roots in the Middle East, through her mother’s and other Muslim women’s past experiences. Brooks interviewed a wide range of Muslim women including Queen Noor of Jordan, Ayatollah Khomeini’s daughter, belly dancers, housewives, activists, and female army recruits but she fails to navigate her position as a facilitator of the ethical voices of Muslim women rather than a spokesperson entitled to legitimise gendered orientalism. Therefore, a gap in Brooks’s exegesis as a journalist is her lack of understanding that one of the crucial aspects in transnational feminist negotiation is respecting differences, contradictions, and incompatibilities in points of view to allow coalition and community building. Brooks’s remarkable idealisation of white Australia as tolerant and inclusive in contrast to the Middle East is thus metaphorically represented as Western apparel versus Eastern hijab. It seems Brooks is not bothered so long as a diasporic Muslim woman’s hijabi corporeality serves as a cosmetic addition to a multicultural display of Australia, but when women like Amal and Sahar choose hijab and unsettle the centrality of whiteness on which Australia exists as a nation, it becomes problematic. This is reflected immediately after Brooks’s completion of her journey, when she returns from Iran to Sydney: As I waited for my luggage, the doors to the arrival hall swished open on a crowd of Indonesian-Australians, waiting to greet their relatives. Almost all of the women were veiled. A swift, mean-spirited thought shot through my jet-lagged brain: ‘Oh, please. Not here too.’ (Brooks 236) The return of this native is marked by a search for white Australian national identity in order to negotiate her sense of belonging to Australia. Her irritation to see the veiled IndonesianAustralians is a reflection of how Islamophobia and the pervasive discourse of race are embedded in the fragility of her white Australian identity. Similar to these Indonesian-Australians, Amal’s hijabi sartorial strategy to resist the taming of unruly minorities pricks the conscience of a nation which was historically a settler colony. Uprooted from their European lineage, the first generation of white Australians denied the Aboriginal existence for their own cultural vision and operational interest and at the same time ignored the spatial epistemology of the land in order to see it as an extension of England and an intangible space of English domesticity. Brooks, along with those Australians in Amal’s life who are unable to accept her hijabi presence, seem to be myopic when it comes to the past sense of alienation and acculturation of first-generation white Australians. Following Brooks, the Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger debated at the Australian National University that the burqa, a tool of patriarchal control, is incompatible with Australian values because it depersonalises women. Arguing further on the feminist discourse of choice and 199

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agency, Haussegger asserts that not all choices are good. She raises the case of Robyn Hutchinson, a Sydney-born Australian woman who was raised in a Christian school, self-converted to Islam, renamed herself Rabiah and served jihadist movements run by the Indonesian leader of Jemaah Islamiyah and Osama bin Laden (see Neighbour). According to Haussegger, Rabiah’s choice of the niqab not only shows her hatred towards the Australian system but also her desire to be segregationist. Similarly to Bronwyn Winter, who writes in Hijab and the Republic: Uncovering the French Headscarf Debate (2009) that hijab is a ‘hypersexualising marker par excellence’ (26), Haussegger contends that hijab is a sexist symbol of men’s ultimate lack of control over women’s bodies. Brooks’s and Hausseger’s argument may hold significance in Rabiah’s case but to homogenise hijabi sartorial strategy from one such singular example in the current geopolitical space of Western imperialism is a short-sighted conclusion that leads to the justification of white nationalist supremacy and the attempt to marginalise communities who reject authoritative imperial power. Thus, Brooks and Abdel-Fattah’s narratives exemplify how hijab signifies a complex intersection of power, authority, resistance, economic hegemony, and globalisation depending on the space, time, and context.

Beyond Sartorial Evaluation In her review of Brooks’s travelogue, Abdel-Fattah observes: A feminist and journalist who purports to be concerned about the situation of Muslim women and human rights abuses, can only summon a comment about the veil in her assessment of her trip to Gaza. Brooks displays no interest in the impact of Israel’s occupation on the lives of Palestinian women – the violation of their basic human rights, the impediments that the occupation places on their choices, freedom of movement, and their access to education and health services, as examples. What matters to the classic Orientalist is what Muslim women wear, and that any oppression they suffer must be due to Islam. (‘Rev. Nine Parts of Desire’) Is Brooks’s privileged position, with her access to international media, publishers, education, and money, hegemonic? Is Abdel-Fattah’s criticism of Brooks without apology too harsh and biased? Situating Brooks and Abdel-Fattah in contemporary Australian feminism and transnationality, we can see multiple overlapping and contradictory feminist practices and agendas between them. While feminist networking can create collective resistances, we also need to be open to pluralism. Western feminist reformism in the name of women’s liberation could become as problematic as patriarchal regulations because sometimes there is little difference between those who appear as liberal democratic and those who are conservative. Brooks fails to understand that abandoning traditional customs is not always the indisputable way to foster social progress and that concepts such as democracy, advancement, and emancipation cannot be fixed and idealised. Whether an attire reflects the wearer’s agency, autonomy, or oppression imposed by an authority, the sartorial significance cannot be universal, ahistorical, and essential. There is no fixed, essential method to characterise women’s liberation and emancipation because in every individual case, liberty and freedom are tied to their intersectional positionality, community, historical resonance, and practices. If feminism is more than an ideology, not limited to cultural, religious and racial boundaries, but rather an epistemology that provides analytical tool (see Cooke), then we should understand that an individual’s liberation is connected to a contingent and contextually determined strategic practice and complex self-positioning. The significance of hijab or veil has multiple belongings, ranging from Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi’s famous 1982 slogan ‘Removing the Veil from the Mind,’ which became the mission of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, and her argument that veiling as a compulsory religious 200

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mandate is un-Islamic, to Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, followed by a nationalist conviction where women veiled themselves to resist Westernisation. Veiling holds no singular unified meaning at local, national, and translational levels. When Huda Shaarawi, the founder and president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, staged a public demonstration in the Cairo railway station by taking off her veil in 1923, it was part of a very different context than the globalised modernity that we see now. Muslim feminists such as Leila Ahmed and Fatima Mernissi have critiqued and problematised the appropriation of veiling by militant Islamic fundamentalist groups, Western feminist orientalists, Muslim nationalists and Western interventionists for their individual search for power. Hijab has no coherent identity and two hijabi-women located in the same or different locations can have incompatible, contradictory identities and positions. Amal and other women who wear hijab in Abdel-Fattah’s novel and the Middle-Eastern women covered in hijab that Brooks comes across during her sojourn all have different complex and multiple meanings related to veiling. At the same time, hijab also presents a pan-ethnic- religious transcultural identity providing all Muslim women an alternative to Western imaginary in a Western public space where Western nation-states have homogenised all Muslims as subalterns. Beyond its surface meaning, for a woman like Amal, hijab could be more than a robe: it could be a spiritual, poetic, revolutionary, symbol of leadership, and intellectually creative. Hijab, in the current sociopolitical context, has become an a priori category with Eurocentric meanings; therefore, literary works such as Does My Head Look Big in This? are important to provide counter-narratives. Reflecting on the journey of this novel, Abdel-Fattah recollects how it has evolved from complete denial and rejection by publishers to a novel that empowers many Muslim teenage girls’ experiences (‘The Double-Bind of Writing’ 4). The question that we still need to answer is: can we interpret a piece of cloth beyond the orient-occident dualism? In other words, when can sartorial evaluation of hijab be decolonised from frames of the orient or the ‘absence’ of Western principles of progress and freedom? To answer this, we need to move beyond the immediate interpretation of seeing hijab simply as a sartorial statement to seeing it as a reflection of subjectivity cultivated by a historically contingent nexus of power.

Notes



Works Cited Abdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? New York: Scholastic, 2005. ———. ‘Rev. Nine Parts of Desire.’ Reading Australia 2015. . ———. ‘The Double-Bind of Writing as an Australian Muslim Woman.’ Mashriq & Mahjar 4.2 (2017): 97–117. Ahmed, Leila. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2011. Brooks, Geraldine. Nine Parts of Desire. The Hidden World of Islamic Women. 1994. New York: Anchor, 1995.

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Devaleena Das Cooke, Miriam. Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature. New York: Routledge, 2001. De Boer, Dieuwe. ‘Tawhidi: 10 Days Later, 3 Lessons the New Zealand Attack Taught Us.’ Right Minds 27 Mar. 2019. . ‘George Brandis: Read the Transcript of His Response to Pauline Hanson Wearing a Burka into the Senate.’ ABC News 17 Aug. 2017. . Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. 1990. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Handal, Nathalie. ‘Both Freedom and Constraint: An Interview with Randa Abdel-Fattah.’ Words Without Borders May 2015. . hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End, 1992. Llewellyn, Owen. ‘Jacinda Ardern Increasingly Criticised for her Endorsement of Female Headcoverings.’ Right Minds 29 Mar. 2019. < https://www.rightminds.nz/articles/jacinda-ardern-increasingly-criticised-herendorsement-female-headcoverings>. Martin, Emily. ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.’ Signs 16.3 (1991): 485–501. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 833–844. Neighbour, Sally. The Mother of Mohammed: An Australian Woman’s Extraordinary Journey into Jihad. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. ‘Profiling Surfaces.’ The Funambulist Papers. Ed. Léopold Lambert. Vol. 2. New York: Punctum, 2015. 8–13. Neshat, Shirin. Women of Allah. New York: Marco Noire Editore, 1997. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. 1609. Ed. Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Shih, Shu-Mei. ‘Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.’ PMLA 119.1 (2004): 16–30. Winter, Bronwyn. Hijab and the Republic: Uncovering the French Headscarf Debate. New York: Syracuse UP, 2009.

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21 AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE IN ASIA China and India David Carter and Paul Sharrad Australian literature travels: through being pushed into other markets and institutional settings via commercial, academic, or diplomatic mechanisms, or through being pulled into these other settings by its own powers of attraction, connections created by migration, or the strategic interests of another country. There is a largely positive story to be told of Australian literature and literary studies in Asia, especially in China, India, and Japan, despite many obstacles, even a relative lack of dialogue between scholars in these countries and their Australian counterparts. It would be tempting to interpret this growth of interest in Australian literature regionally as a strong instance of transnationalism, and so it might be in some very broad sense of the term. But just as often the paradigm has been a form of ‘comparative nationalisms,’ even where postcolonialism or another transnational framing is used. Australian literature has been a significant force in creating interest in Australia among scholars, students, and general readers abroad, but there is always the risk of literature ‘representing’ the nation in ways both naïve and overdetermined. The present chapter focusses on China and India (for background on the Japanese context, see Arimitsu).1 In both we see what is in many ways a remarkable story of the expansion and deepening of Australian literature’s presence, although unevenly spread across commercial and educational domains. Australian institutional support, through government agencies and universities, has been crucial, despite limited resources or policy investment. Being a predominantly Anglophone literature brings both advantages and disadvantages. In China, certainly, being in English makes Australian literature attractive to many university students and staff as part of their country’s push into international affairs. At the same time, within English studies, Australian literature must make its way as a minor player in a world dominated by British, American, and Canadian Anglophone literatures. Just as this context (or competition), in turn, makes Australia’s ‘regional’ identity critical, so too its multiculturalism and the powerful presence of Indigenous cultures do in breaking down any assumption of a singular or unified national identity.

China There is now a small but rich archive of articles in English on the presence of Australian literature in China and the history of Chinese critical approaches to Australian literature. Most are written by insiders, scholars and teachers of Australian literature working in Chinese universities. What follows is an outsider’s view, though from one who has been closely involved with Australian Studies in China since the early 1990s.2 The study of Australian literature has, from its outset in the 1980s, been the largest disciplinary concentration within Australian Studies in China, but, for 203

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complex reasons, not always at its leading edge. However, as discussed below, a significant renewal of the field has taken place over the last decade and a half, changing the nature of both Australian literary studies in China and the relations between Chinese and Australian literary scholarship. The 2017 Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference acknowledged these developments, having as its theme ‘Looking In, Looking Out: China and Australia’ and featuring over 20 papers by Chinese participants. In China itself, the 2018 conference of the Chinese Association for Australian Studies saw more than 30 papers by Chinese scholars on Australian literature, including three on Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), two on Kim Scott’s Benang (1999), four on children’s literature, and others on a range of authors from Elizabeth Jolley and Peter Carey to Gail Jones, Bruce Pascoe, and Marion Campbell. Australian literature is now taught in at least a dozen Chinese universities. In the field of translation, in 2010 ten contemporary novels appeared in a single series (listed in Ouyang 68), and subsequently new translations have ranged from the challenging Carpentaria (2012) to popular fiction such as Kate Morton’s The Shifting Fog (2016) and Jane Harper’s The Dry (2017).3 In 2015, a new Anthology of Contemporary Australian Fiction, edited by Zhu Jiongqiang, was published, presenting 47 authors from Patrick White to Alice Pung; and in 2016, translations of five new Aboriginal narratives appeared.4 In criticism over the last decade, as well as monographs on White, Carey, Jolley, Garner, and Thomas Keneally (Wang, ‘A Hard-Won Success’ 54; Zhu, Helen Garner), ambitious studies have appeared on cultural diversity and colonialism (Ye), identity in contemporary Aboriginal literature (Yang, A Study of Identity), Australian eco-literature (Xiang), and Indigenous representation in Australian children’s literature (Xu, Indigenous Cultural Capital). Finally, a major history of Australian literary criticism from A.G. Stephens to ‘post-theory’ was published in 2016 (Wang, A History of Australian Literary Criticism) – to our knowledge nothing equivalent exists in other languages. Zhou Xiaojin’s in-depth analysis of Chinese journal articles on Australian literature to 2016, however, is somewhat sobering. While such articles have grown from a handful each year before 2000 to more than 80 on average, the total still lags behind comparable articles on American, British, and Canadian literatures. Further, Zhou Xiaojin diagnoses an institutional anxiety behind the fact that only a small number of scholars, when publishing their articles, identify their primary research field as Australian literature; many of the articles on Australian texts are written by scholars without wider expertise in the field. Despite the vibrant conferences, it remains relatively rare for Chinese academics to be able to pursue a career defined primarily in terms of Australian literature, and the possibilities of undertaking a PhD in Australian literature are limited, though expanding significantly for study in both China and Australia. And while the internet has greatly increased access for scholars to Australian materials – noticeable in the contemporaneity of recent critical work – for many access to books and print journals remains difficult.5 Among the developing archive of work on Australian literature in China are some unexpected early signs of its presence. Short stories by thriller and crime writers Guy Boothby and Fergus Hume appeared in Chinese magazines in 1906–1907, no doubt due to their British and American reputations (Ouyang 65). Poems by Mary Gilmore, Hugh McCrae, and Roderic Quinn appeared in a magazine in 1921, selected by the Chinese writer Mao Dun, a key figure in the ‘modernising’ movements of the 1920s and 1930s.6 ‘These poems are somewhat similar to modern American poetry,’ Mao Dun wrote, ‘there is neither arrogance nor humility, neither tiredness nor nervousness, neither indulgence in nihilism nor exaggerated beauty, nor any alarm or bewilderment at the ugliness and difficulties of the material environment’ (qtd in Yang, ‘Australian Poetry’ 9). As Nicholas Jose remarks, the comments implied a contrast with China.7 A magazine article on the contemporary Australian literary scene, by novelist and academic Zhao Jingshen, appeared in 1929.8 The news was not encouraging. Australian literature remained undeveloped and unsupported. There were no worthy literary periodicals – the Bulletin was no longer significant and the Triad was read for entertainment rather than literary content. There 204

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was no solidarity among those engaged in literature, while readers denigrated the local product, preferring third-rate British and American imports. Australians were more interested in timber and mines than literature. The author, nonetheless, highlights Gordon, McCrae, and, above all, Katharine Susannah Prichard. We do not know the source of Zhao Jingshen’s information, but the article is up-to-date and well-informed; the negative diagnosis was certainly shared by many in the Australian literary world at the time. This sequence of contacts raises interesting questions regarding parallels between China and Australia and modernising literary movements in the interwar years. Yu Ouyang (65) has also noted Australian literature appearing in 1934, alongside literatures from Peru, Poland, Hungary, Korea, and Estonia among others, in a journal special issue devoted to ‘Literatures from the Weak and Small Nations.’ China, too, could be grouped among such nations at this time. Today we might understand the concept in terms of Pascale Casanova’s model of the world republic of letters, which provides a way of understanding Australian literature’s situation in China alongside other Anglophone literatures. Australia can miss out on two sides, being neither a major ‘first-world’ literature nor a definable ‘third-world’ literature (Wang, ‘A Hard-Won Success’ 55); postcolonial theory offers an alternative language to argue Australian literature into an academically recognised paradigm. The next phase was the translation of Australian works following the 1949 communist revolution. Between 1953 and 1964, 23 books were translated by high-quality translators and published by major houses, mainly works by communist and left-leaning authors, including James Aldridge, Frank Hardy, Judah Waten, Dymphna Cusack, Mona Brand – and Henry Lawson (Pugsley 90; Ouyang 66).9 This resembled the contemporaneous pattern of publication in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and East Germany, and the books possibly arrived through Russian rather than Australian literary connections. The impact of these translations is unclear, but we might guess they were read in an internationalist spirit, for their populist, anti-capitalist, or anti-imperialist sympathies, rather than for their distinctive national qualities. This first phase of translating foreign literature ended with the Cultural Revolution (and was probably not helped by the Communist Party of Australia’s break with Beijing in 1963). Translations only pick up again in the 1980s, apart from a collection of Lawson’s stories in 1978. While translations are vital, the bulk of criticism in the academic sphere occurs in the context of English or Foreign Language schools and hence through work on the original English-language texts. Further, translations are often subsidised rather than commercial productions and have limited distribution. Approaches to criticism and literary history, then, are as significant to the story of research and reception as the history of translations, although the influence clearly works in both directions. As others have recounted, the study of Australian literature in China began in a systematic, institutionalised way with the return to China of a group of scholars who had undertaken Masters-level study at the University of Sydney from 1979 to 1981. The now legendary ‘Gang of Nine,’ nine young male university teachers, were selected by the Chinese government to study in Australia.10 At the University of Sydney they studied with linguist Michael Halliday, who would become the best-known Australian intellectual in China, and, for Australia literature, with Leonie Kramer. An important decision was made that the visiting scholars would undertake a full MA programme. For those focussing on literary studies this meant a comprehensive introduction to canonical Australian literature and literary history, with long-term effects on Australian literary studies in China. In Australia itself, this was a critical moment in the history of Australian literary studies. The canon of Australian literature instituted in the academy in the 1950s and 1960s around notions of universal literary significance – and culminating in A.D. Hope’s poetry and White’s novels – remained the foundation for most courses in Australian literature. But it was beginning to be challenged by a new generation influenced by the ‘new nationalism’ of the period and by neo-Marxist and feminist approaches. The moment of ‘theory’ was about to disrupt the predominance of ethico-formalist approaches in English departments (Carter, ‘Critics, Writers, 205

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Intellectuals’ 272–283). Kramer’s Oxford History of Australian Literature appeared in 1981, just as the Chinese scholars were finishing their studies. The largely hostile response it provoked in Australia for the narrowness of its canon and the limitations of its critical approach was symptomatic of these shifting tides, but they had yet to make their major impacts.11 Nonetheless, the Sydney experiment was a success by any measure, although in fact the first university base for Australian literary studies was in the Oceanic Literature Research unit founded by Ma Zuyi, not one of the Sydney group, at Anhui University in 1979 (Hu, ‘The Oceanic Literature Research Institute’). The ‘Oceanic’ framing was an enabling one and has continued into the present, mostly recently with the (re)launch of Oceanic Literary Studies in 2014 (Ouyang 66). Those who had studied literature at Sydney, however, played an essential role in translating their experience into Australian Studies Centres and teaching programs, despite Australia’s marginal status both in the Chinese university system and among Anglophone literatures: Hu Wenzhong at Beijing Foreign Languages Institute (later Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1983), Huang Yuanshen at East China Normal University (1985), and Wang Guofu at Soochow University (1991). The Chinese Australian Studies Association held its first conference in 1988. Although the field was still very much in its formative stages, important books began to appear (Zhou 256): anthologies in English, selected for teaching purposes, including Hu Wenzhong’s A Selection of Australian Short Stories in 1983 and Huang Yuanshen’s Selected Readings in Australian Literature – from Harpur to Carey – in 1986; translations of canonical works, especially His Natural Life (1870–1872) and Robbery Under Arms (1882) in 1985, and White’s The Eye of the Storm (1973, trans. 1986), The Tree of Man (1955, trans. 1990), and Voss (1957, trans. 1991); critical articles, such as those included in A Collection of Chinese Critical Essays on Australian Literature in 1993 (Tang; Wang, ‘Australian Literature in China’ 122–126); and in 1997, Huang Yuanshen’s A History of Australian Literature, the single most influential work on Australian literature published in China.12 Support from the Australia-China Council helped Australian Studies Centres develop, and this assistance was formalised into an Australian Studies in China programme in 1997 with grant schemes for research projects, curriculum development, publishing subsidies, and cultural ‘outreach’ activities (Carter, ‘Living with Instrumentalism’). Australian Writers Week has been significant, too, since 2007, with four authors selected annually to tour major centres in China.13 As these books suggest, the Sydney experience enabled the study of Australian literature in China from the outset to be more than ‘random attacks’ on individual texts and authors. It offered a powerful historical narrative of national emergence, which was also a growth into cultural maturity, from colonial to national to ‘modern’ (but not modernist) literature; and the standing of literature could also be taken as a gauge of national standing. Again, this was the history that culminated in White (with newer literature being understood as furthering this modern ‘internationalist’ phase); White’s status as a Nobel Prize winner also lent academic credibility to the study of Australian literature. Further, this history could chime with ‘the long Chinese tradition of historicising writers and works’ (Zhou 263). Lawson remains the key figure for the nationalist period, and while his literary shortcomings might be noticed his status remains relatively untouched by the critiques of nationalism that defined the Oxford History’s approach. In short, the canon inscribed in Kramer’s Oxford History was not translated directly into Chinese readings; other authors central to this canon – Christopher Brennan, Henry Handel Richardson, Martin Boyd – have not been prominent in Chinese criticism. Contemporary authors have been added to the lists of criticism and works translated, especially those who could be seen to be advancing the ‘modernisation’ of Australian literature, and then, more recently, its diversity. Keneally, Carey, Thea Astley, and Christina Stead appeared before 2000, Scott, Malouf, Wright, and Jones, among others, since that time. There is a particular interest in writers with a Chinese connection: Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage (1983) was translated early, in 1991, the same year as Jose’s Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989); Alex Miller’s The Ancestor Game (1992) appeared in 1995.14 206

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Alongside academic interest, there has also been a growing commercial trade for both literary and popular fiction titles, not least in children’s and young adult literature. The translation with the greatest impact remains undoubtedly that of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds (1977). There have been nine editions of the novel since 1983, including an annotated edition for English-language students (Ouyang 67; Zhou 257).15 The book has also been influential in academic circles, so much so that McCullough’s exclusion from critical consideration in Australia needs revisiting. Ouyang counts 18 MA theses and 24 academic articles to 2011, while more than 15% of the articles Zhou Xiaojin examines are on McCullough (though often not by academics working in Australian literature). From this outsider’s perspective, a new stage was initiated in Chinese Australian literary studies around 2010, a ‘third wave’ perhaps, following the foundational work of the 1980s and 1990s and then a second generation of critically updated work in the 2000s (see works listed in Wang, ‘A Hard-Won Success’ 54; the ‘third wave’ is present in journal articles rather than books at this stage). A new critical self-reflexivity emerged, in part as new PhDs from Australian and Chinese universities began to make an impact. Theoretical approaches were taken up far more actively, especially feminism, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism, joined more recently by ecocriticism, diaspora theories, and ethics/affect studies. Aboriginal narratives have become a major focus – Zhan Chunjuan notes 11 journal articles on Carpentaria in recent years (although she also notes some limitations in critical method) – together with a new interest in Australian Chinese-language literature. As suggested, the internet enabled a new contemporaneity with Australian and international trends, catalysed by new pressures for internationalisation, higher graduate qualifications, and publication metrics within the Chinese university system. Articles on Australian literature by Chinese scholars have begun to appear in Australian or international journals, participating in current Australian – and international – debates (see, for example, Wang, Translation in Diasporic Literatures; Xu, ‘Liminality and Communitas’; Zong). At the same time, the historical legacy produces certain biases and gaps in the field, some of which might be seen positively, as expressing a distinctive Chinese take on Australian literature, others of which identify areas ripe for further critical attention. Despite shared theoretical references, there also remain key differences in critical approach, with Chinese scholars typically more respectful towards canonical works and traditions, and, for better or worse, less automatically drawn to the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ than their Australian counterparts. The critical focus, unsurprisingly, remains concentrated on canonical authors and texts (Zhou 255–256), although these are diversifying through feminist, Indigenous, diasporic, and ecocritical interests.16 More telling are some major historical and theoretical revisions that have not been taken up in significant ways. Apart from the publication of Ye Shengnian’s projects on colonial literature (Ye, Hua, and Yang), there has been little interest in the major revisionary work on nineteenth-century literature that has radically reshaped ideas of colonial literary history through the reassessment of romance fiction (especially women’s) and the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of colonial print cultures. The emphasis on turn-of-the-century nationalism continues to marginalise colonial literary cultures in the ‘Australian story.’ Something similar can be said about the interwar years – the years between Lawson and White – first revisited by Australian scholars in the 1980s–1990s, largely through feminist interrogations, and again more recently through new studies of modernity, middlebrow cultures, and print culture studies. These new approaches have not greatly influenced Chinese scholarship, and the ‘pre-White’ twentieth century remains something of a blank. Major figures such as Eleanor Dark and even Prichard outside Coonardoo (1929) remain largely invisible. Chinese critics have also remarked that the potential for comparative or transnational approaches remains undeveloped (Wang, ‘A Hard-Won Success’ 55; Zhou 262 – but see Wang, Translation in Diasporic Literatures). So too does the potential offered for comparative work across 207

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our two ‘provincial modernisms.’ The point here is less about comprehensiveness than the major revisions to understandings of Australia’s literary and cultural history that such work has produced. While the contemporary canon is updated and diversified, its historical underpinnings remain largely unchanged; beyond the literary history, historical and social contexts are not widely or intensively studied (beyond themes such as the Chinese in Australian history and again, more recently, some elements of Indigenous history). Still, looking over the story of Australian literary studies in China since the early 1980s, what is notable is its relative diversity and continued expansion in the face of cultural and institutional challenges and often limited access to resources.

India Australian literature in India can be compared with its reception in China – the long attachment to formalist close readings of canonical nationalist works, for example – but historical connections have been quite different, especially because of the greater familiarity of many Indian students with English language and culture. Although colonialism affects relations across all three countries, modern literary studies show different patterns: India, for instance, pays little attention at all to The Thorn Birds (a difference worth study in itself ) though Lawson and the Bush tradition has also been a consistent interest. If the China connection has filled pages on prejudicial representations of Chinese in Australian literature, Indian scholarship has tended in its earlier years to look at positive links favouring Indian heritage: White’s use of Indian motifs; Les Murray’s view of a common cattle-herding culture; supposed origins of Aboriginal peoples in the South of India. The Traditional Markets Agreement that held sway in Anglophone publishing for many years had the effect of limiting the flow of Australian books to other countries while promulgating an ideal of Commonwealth exchange. Internally, India operated outside of international copyright conventions for a long time, so that Australians were reluctant to give material direct to Indian publishers. Hence, unlike China, India had a sense of commonality with and access to Australia but not the drive or the legal structure to promote local editions of primary works or readers’ guides. Most scholarly exchange therefore occurred within university-sponsored (mostly English Department) publications produced by a few individual enthusiasts.17 Australian literary ties with India date from colonial times, when John Lang, the first Australian-born novelist, moved to practise law, then journalism in Calcutta, and published fiction about Company life there from the 1840s. Australia continued to send people to India, first as colonial functionaries (like nurse, Molly Skinner, who depicts a comic picaro abroad in Tucker Sees India [1937], and military wife, Ethel Anderson, who lived in India for 20 years from 1904 and published Indian Tales in 1948), then as travellers (Christopher Koch’s Across the Sea Wall [1965] depicts young people encountering ‘the East’ en route to Britain), and sojourners (married to an anthropologist, Janette Turner Hospital spent time in Kerala, depicted in The Ivory Swing [1982]). Other than Lang, the literary traffic between India and Australia was for a long time largely one way, with colonial officers moving south after service under the Raj. Two exceptions were WH (Wilton Hack) and Mary Bright, who published through the Madras Theosophical Society in 1905 and 1926 respectively. Later migrations of Anglo-Indians and Indians could publish work back in India or return to settle and publish (as, for example, Malaya Gangopadhyay, who produced stories, essays, and an autobiography in Calcutta between 1985 and 2005). However, there have been some Australian works translated or reissued in India. Boothby’s My Strangest Case (1901) appeared in Urdu in Delhi some years after its English publication, and Australian journalist Godfrey Blunden had a Tamil version of his novel A Room on the Route published in 1947. Through the 1980s and since, a number of children’s picture books have been translated, mainly into Hindi and Tamil, with Philip Cummings’s Wilbur (2010) in both languages. Young adult novel, Fake ID (2002) by Hazel Edwards has been issued in Tamil translation (2018). Michael 208

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Wilding has had intermittent connections to India and some of his stories were published in Hindi in 2001. A Murray collection, The Bridges/Setu came out in Hindi in 2003. Set in Mumbai, the ever-popular crime thriller Shantaram (2003) has come out in Marathi (2010), but also in Malayalam (2013). (Shantaram may be the Indian equivalent of The Thorn Birds, though it has not inspired the same amount of scholarly attention.) Mridula Chakraborty brought together Dalit and Aboriginal writers and produced a special issue of Cordite in both Hindi and English (2016) that circulated across both countries. Aboriginal writing is a favourite with Indian readers of Australian literature, and R. Azhagarasan has translated some into Tamil, Angshuman Kar going a step further and publishing a small book of Aboriginal poems translated into Bengali. Poetry and short stories have appeared in collections of essays and as specific anthologies. The Indian journals Poet and Mosaic had special Australian issues as early as 1965 and 1967 and C.D. Narasimhaiah’s Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry (1990) included a generous selection of Australians, from Shaw Neilson to Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Dialogues with Australian Poets, edited by R.P. Sharma, appeared in Calcutta in 1993. Australian Ron Pretty edited The Road South: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, which came from a Calcutta publisher in 2007. In Delhi, Santosh Sareen had already edited Contemporary Australian Short Stories (2001), Rob Harle, Sunil, and Sangeeta Sharma collected material as Indo-Australian Anthology of Poetry (2013) and Indo-Australian Anthology of Short Fiction (2014). Anurag Sharma’s Mehraab/The Arch (2008) featured a wide range of Australian poets. Writers’ Workshop, in Calcutta, has been a regular publisher of Australian work – mainly poetry, of which John Kinsella’s The Silo (1995) is the most significant, but also the short stories of Australian-Sri Lankan academic Chitra Fernando. HarperCollins India published a sampling of mostly white Australians writing about India in Of Sadhus and Spinners (Sareen et al., 2009) and Hyderabad’s Orient Blackswan published its counterpart, Of Indian Origin: Writings from Australia (Sharrad and Chatterjee, 2018) – work by Australians of Indian heritage. Indian publishers have over time taken on Frank Clune’s To the Isles of Spice (1946), Mary Holliday’s Open Season for Fury (1991), Libby Hathorn’s time-travel young adult (YA) novel centred on the Taj Mahal, A Face in the Water (1994), Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000), Bem LeHunte’s The Seduction of Silence (2000) and There Where the Pepper Grows (2006), Sally Morgan’s My Place (2001), Yasmine Gooneratne’s Masterpiece (2002), Kim Scott’s Benang (2003), Ines Baranay’s Neem Dreams (2003) and With the Tiger (2008), and David McMahon’s Vegemite Vindaloo (2006). Most of this list involves Penguin India, and often visits by the writers to India. One major exception is My Place: its publication under a ‘home-grown’ publisher indicates how central that book has been to the classroom study that guarantees a solid market. Such writing did not circulate very widely in India until Professors C.D. Narasimhaiah and K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar introduced Commonwealth literary studies into university curricula in the late 1960s with subsequent support from others such as Meenakshi Mukherjee, Jasbir Jain, Shyamala Narayan, H.H. Anniah Gowda, C. Vijayashree, Sanjukta Dasgupta, K. Chellappan, Syed Amanuddin, and Harish Trivedi. Under the broad banner of Commonwealth literary studies, Narasimhaiah produced a special Australian issue of his journal, The Literary Criterion, in 1964 and a collection of essays by Australians, The Flowering of Australian Literature (1981). Australian and Indian teachers and writers began visiting each other. P. Lal (Calcutta), Alur Janaki Ram ( Jaipur), Ayappa Paniker (Trivandrum), R.K. Narayan (Mysore), and Jayanta Mahapatra (Orissa), for example, all toured Australian universities and literary festivals during the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps the peak of this foundational two-way traffic and its concomitant formation in India of subjects on Australian literature was the triennial conference of the Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies, held in Delhi in 1977, when Hope, Wallace-Crabbe, Ken Goodwin, Syd Harrex, and Chris and Helen Tiffin were among the Australian participants. The next phase consolidated interest by way of support through the Australian High Commission and then the Australia-India Council. They supplied packages of reading materials and 209

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eventually ran a programme of ‘familiarisation tours’ for postgraduates and lecturers working on Australian subjects, with some support for Australian writers and lecturers to attend conferences and build research collaborations in India. Gillian Whitlock was one of the drivers from the Australian end during this period, along with Philip Mead, Dennis Haskell, Richard Nile, David Dunstan, Andrew Hassam, Peter Gale and many more. During this time, there was an effort in India to achieve a ‘critical mass’ that would make Australian literary studies sustainable. An Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA) was founded in 2000 preceded by the wider ranging but India-based Association for Australasian Studies in Asia (founded 1995). These promoted the main form of scholarship: books of selected papers from biennial conferences. One example is the massive collection from the latter organisation, Patrick White Centenary: The Legacy of a Prodigal Son, edited by Cynthia Van Den Driesen and Bill Ashcroft (2014). A lot has depended on the enthusiasm of individuals, and that frequently dissipated once they retired or moved to another university. The location of most Australian studies within university departments of English Literature meant that interest was always hedged about with competing subjects on African, Caribbean and (for many years the better resourced) Canadian literatures. Stalwarts in keeping things moving were Asha Das at the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, Santosh Sareen at Jawaharlal Nehru University, with regular input from Bruce Bennett, Malati Mathur at Indira Gandhi Open University, and R.K. Dhawan from Delhi University, often backed by David Kerr and Van Den Driesen. Eugenie Pinto kept things moving in Chennai, with regular visits by Judith Rodriguez and Baranay and teaching stints by C.A. Cranston and others. K. Radha headed New Literatures teaching in Trivandrum for many years. An Australian and New Zealand Studies centre was set up at Himachal Pradesh University under Pankaj Singh, one of several over time, most of which have since faded from view. An exception is the Australian Studies Resource Centre established in the English Department at Burdwan University, West Bengal. Since 1999 this has taught MPhil- and PhD-level Australian literature and run workshops with visiting Australians. It published two volumes of a journal, Australian Studies, and when funds ran out worked with Calcutta editors and publishers to produce books of Australian poetry translated into Bengali. Debnarayan Bandyopadhyay went on from there to establish another centre for Australian Studies and teaching programme at Bankura University in 2014, working with people from the University of New South Wales, Monash University, the University of Wollongong, and the Australian National University.18 Other people teaching and often editing books of papers on Australian writing have been Makarand Paranjape ( Jawaharlal Nehru University), Pradeep Trikha (Ajmer and Udaipur), Jaydeep Sarangi (Calcutta), and Pramod K. Nayar (Hyderabad). A key moment of this consolidation phase was a meeting in 1998 of interested scholars from across the country at the Australian High Commission, chaired by Australia India Council officer Sheel Nuna, to establish a model curriculum for Australian literary studies. This was followed up with a planning meeting in Simla in 2000. In fact, the movement had gained sufficient momentum for a regional branch of IASA to be formed, centred on West Bengal but servicing the surrounding eastern states. The book best representing this period of consolidation is the hefty compendium of essays assembled by Amit and Reema Sarwal, Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader (2009), published in New Delhi. Study of Australian literature has remained framed by ‘new literatures’ and ‘postcolonial’ ideas, so that books are usually studied in comparison with or alongside other ‘Commonwealth’ samplings. This kept the focus for a long time on questions of national identity, land, and settler history, and the most studied authors were Hope, White, and Judith Wright (stylistically harmonious with the kind of British writing at the centre of English Literature departments). All three continue to appear in current BA and Master’s subjects, usually framed by comparisons with Canadian and New Zealand texts. Getting enough material for comparisons and reliance on national literary anthologies as sources for texts means that poems and short stories tend to dominate 210

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curricula, though Voss is widely taught still, and Kerala University unusually includes a play by David Williamson. The interest in poetry among staff at Dayanand College, Ajmer, produced an unusual concentration of doctoral theses on Robert Gray, John Tranter, Alan Gould, Kevin Hart, Kinsella, and Adamson during the early 2000s. There and elsewhere, however, MPhil and PhD work tends to concentrate on fiction: White, Malouf, Carey, Mudrooroo, Turner Hospital, Grenville, Jolley, Flanagan, Scott, and Wright, being among the more common writers studied. Of late, there has been some interest in young adult and graphic fiction as well. In taught courses, especially at undergraduate and MA level, texts are often limited to short pieces from available anthologies. Selections can sometimes seem fairly random and it is hard to see what sort of picture of Australian literature/society/culture might be formed from the scant offerings in many comparative subjects, where texts exist mainly to illustrate the abstract concepts of postcolonial theory. As India established its own sense of nationhood and became aware of internal differences, so interest shifted, first towards feminist readings and then Indian diaspora studies, in which Australia, for its historical exclusion of non-white immigrants, has been a tiny corner of A mericanand British-focussed work. ‘Dalit’ (subaltern/ underclass) issues and pan-Indigenous studies have encouraged comparisons with Aboriginal literature (not without considerable strain at times). Jack Davis, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Morgan, and Scott have become canonical on Indian courses influenced by this change. More recently, as in China, attention has moved to the environmental humanities and eco-criticism and (in keeping with shifts in Australia) to transnational themes and literary networks, with extensions into cultural studies. Goa is something of an ‘outlier’ in that it teaches Australian material (mainly film) as a case study in an optional MA subject, Multimedia in Cultural Literacies, but includes in the socio-historical background reading many works used by literary scholars. Indian interest in Australia, outside of personal contacts, sport, and later call-centre contracts, was initially developed by departments of English, but in the last few decades there has been a push to expand into other disciplines to build a fully fledged Australian Studies profile. Literature remains a key focus, but arguably no longer enjoys the prominence it once had. Within its ambit, and as reception becomes as important as production in analyses, questions around the benefits and limits of cross-cultural reading continue to crop up at conferences, where textual interpretation among postgrads frequently suffers from lack of access to a wide range of materials and lack of familiarity with sociocultural context, leading to recycling of thematic close readings and/or to distortions of the work because viewed too narrowly through a particular critical lens. At the same time, views from outside of Australia can produce new, sometimes unsettlingly vivid perceptions of Australian culture. There have been some interesting applications of Indian aesthetics (Sanskrit rasa-dhvani suggestion; traditional Tamil codes of place, time and mood) to reading Australian texts. These tend to overlook the more flexible workings of modern writers that reduce the viability of using traditional theories, but they usefully interrogate the fact that Western models of some vintage are often unquestioningly deployed when reading any kinds of literary work. Books that circulate without being part of educational programmes are usually those garnering international fame, so that Booker prize-winning titles continue to appear in bookshops (Carey, Coetzee and Keneally representing Australia, with Flanagan as a recent addition). Books that are set in India also receive attention, so travel narratives like Sarah Macdonald’s Holy Cow (2002) can often be found, and the lasting and most pervasive book is Gregory David Roberts’s blockbuster, Shantaram, visible on many railway and streetside bookstalls. With the entrance of global combines into the Indian market, the breaking down of old trade barriers, and increasing movement of people to and from Australia, more Australian books are making it into Indian markets, Garth Nix’s young adult work being one example. Now resident in India, sometime Australian Aravind Adiga can see The White Tiger (2008) everywhere, even touted to motorists stopped at intersections. Deliberate ‘cross-over’ books also find publication, such as the series edited by Meenakshi Bharat 211

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and Sharon Rundle. They choose a theme with relevance to both countries (as with Fear Factor: Terror Incognito [2009]) and showcase writing from each place. Today, the international circuit of literary festivals ensures that two-way visits by writers continue. The Jaipur Literature Festival held a spin-off event in Melbourne in 2017 and delegations of Australians have gone to Jaipur over the last five years or so, as well as to the Kolkata Book Fair and the Hyderabad Literary Festival. Interest is building in young Australian writers of Indian heritage (Roanna Gonsalves’s story collection The Permanent Resident [2016] being issued by Speaking Tiger as Sunita De Souza Goes to Sydney [2019]). That said, interest in the field remains constrained by the limited availability of both primary texts and secondary material. Governments and their agencies have turned more towards big business and have discontinued the face-to-face cultural work of providing teaching materials and fieldwork experience for scholars. The work of individual enthusiasts continues to be the driver of the university-level studies by which most readers in India encounter Australian literature.

Notes 1 A translation series has been established in Japan. To date books translated include David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (1993, trans. 2012); Tim Winton, Breath (2008, trans. 2013); Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap (2008, trans. 2014); Kate Grenville, The Secret River (2006, trans. 2015); Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance (2010, trans. 2017); Helen Garner, This House of Grief (2014, trans. 2018); Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel (2012, trans. forthcoming). 2 David Carter was manager of the Australia-China Council’s (ACC) Australian Studies in China programme from 2002 to 2016 and remains a board member of the Foundation for Australian Studies in China (FASIC). He had the privilege of being on the jury for the oral defence of the first Chinese PhD on Australian literature (Ni). The discussion that follows is indebted to the articles cited throughout and to ongoing conversations with Chinese colleagues involved in teaching, translating, and researching Australian literature. 3 Plus 13 titles from J.M. Coetzee. At the time of writing, AustLit is upgrading its indexing of such translations as part of a project to build a dedicated interface for Chinese scholars and students. 4 The Australian Literary Translation Project was under the direction of Huang Yuanshen. The Australian Indigenous Culture Chinese Translation project was under the direction of Li Yao. Both projects were supported by Australian funds through the ACC and FASIC respectively. The five Indigenous titles published in 2016 are: Convincing Ground, Bruce Pascoe (2007); Fight for Liberty and Freedom, John Maynard (2007); Mutton Fish, Betty Cruse, Liddy Stewart, Sue Norman (2005); My Ngarrindjeri Calling, Doreen Kartinyeri, Sue Anderson (2008); Paint Me Black, Claire Henty-Gebert (2005). 5 Through its Australian Studies in China program the ACC until 2015 supported the development of major collections of Australian Studies materials for the library of Beijing Foreign Studies University and the Shanghai Municipal Library, in addition to helping individual Australian Studies Centres build collections. More recently, FASIC has supported access for Chinese centres to the AustLit database and Australian Literary Studies. 6 All three poets appeared in Walter Murdoch’s 1918 Oxford Book of Australasian Verse, a possible source; but the magazine also printed from T.G. Tucker’s Sonnets of Shakespeare’s Ghosts (1920), published under the pseudonym Gregory Thornton. 7 Ouyang (65) also reports evidence of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Poems (1893) being available in China in 1927, through the diaries of Mao Dun’s contemporary Yu Dafu. 8 Liu Shusen from Peking University presented a paper on this article in Beijing in 2015. I thank him for bringing it to my attention and providing further information and a draft translation. Zhao Jingshen did not travel to Australia, but was editor-in-chief at a popular literary publisher in Shanghai, which could have supplied foreign books to him. He was also actively engaged in the literary movement promoting world literature in China in the 1920s and 1930s, through which he may have accessed works of or on Australian literature. 9 Works by James Aldridge, Frank Hardy, Jack Lindsay, Judah Waten, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Wilfred Burchett, Dymphna Cusack, Mona Brand, Ralph de Boissiere, and Henry Lawson, plus a short story collection, The Tracks We Travel (1961) and Leslie Rees’s children’s novel Digit Dick on the Barrier Reef (1942). Up-to-date information supplied by Li Jianjun.

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Australian Literature in Asia 10 The nine scholars were Du Ruiqing, Hou Weirui, Long Rijin, Qian Jiaoru, Yang Chaoguang, Hu Wenzhong, Hu Zhuanglin, Huang Yuanshen, and Wang Goufu. The last four named were foundational in establishing Australian Studies in China (see Hu, ‘Interpreting the “Gang of Nine”’). 11 AusLit provides a full list of critical responses at https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/ C230851?mainTabTemplate=workWorksAbout&from=0&count=10000. See in particular reviews by Barnes, Blight, Carter, Docker, Dutton, Green, and Pierce. 12 A concise edition, coauthored with Peng Qinglong, appeared in 2006, and a revised edition in 2014. Zhou Xiaojin (259) notes that the book is the most cited of all works in the Chinese journal articles he examines. Huang Yuanshen (A Unique Literature) and Hu Wenzhong (A Chinese Perspective) also published collections of their own critical articles. See also Huang, ‘Publish or Perish?’ 13 In 2018 the authors were Richard Flanagan, Charlotte Wood, Alexis Wright, and Fiona Wright. In 2019, Morris Gleitzman, Richard Fidler, Graeme Simsion, and Julie Koh. 14 Subsequently: Castro, After China (1992, trans. 1995) and Shanghai Dancing (2003, trans. 2010); Jose, The Rose Crossing (1994, trans. 1997) and The Custodians (1997, trans. 2000); Miller, Journey to the Stone Country (2002, trans. 2007) and Landscape of Farewell (2007, trans. 2009). Also Hsu-Ming Teo, Love and Vertigo (2000, trans. 2003). 15 Pugsley gives 1984 as the date of publication with a first print run of 185,000. 16 Then again, a similar list of articles produced by Australian scholars might not be too different. 17 Much of the detail that follows is gleaned from the AustLit database. Thanks also to Pradeep Trikha, Eugenie Pinto, and Debnarayan Bandyopadhyay for helpful advice. Any inaccuracies are the writer’s own. 18 The author of this section, Paul Sharrad, has attended conferences of IASA and the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS) over 20 years and lectured on Australian topics at many of the key colleges and universities, hosting many of the Australia-India Council visiting fellows at the University of Wollongong. Different slants on this overview can be found in the introduction to Sharrad and Chatterjee; Sharrad, ‘Convicts, Call Centres and Cochin Kangaroos’; Sharrad, ‘Reconfiguring “Asian Australian” Writing’; Sharrad, ‘Les Murray in a Dhoti.’

Works Cited Angshuman Kar, ed. and trans. Kalo Australiar Kabita (Aboriginal Poetry). Calcutta: Saptarshi and Australia India Council, 2009. Arimitsu, Yasue. ‘The Contemporary State of Academic Appraisal of Australian Literature in Japanese Universities.’ Antipodes 25.1 (2011): 7–13. Azhagarasan, R. ‘Engaging with Indigeneity: Reflections on Translating Aboriginal Poetry into Tamil.’ Narratives of Estrangement and Belonging: Indo-Australian Perspectives. Ed. Neelima Kanwar. New Delhi: Authorspress, 2016. 113–128. Carter, David. ‘Critics, Writers, Intellectuals: Australian Literature and its Criticism.’ The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Webby. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 258–293. ———. ‘Living with Instrumentalism: The Academic Commitment to Cultural Diplomacy.’ International Journal of Cultural Policy 21.4 (2015): 478–493. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. Hu, Wenzhong. A Chinese Perspective on Australian Literature. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research P, 1994. Hu, Yifeng. ‘The Oceanic Literature Research Institute, Anhui University, China.’ Notes and Furphies 15 (1985): 14–16. Hu, Zhuanglin. ‘Interpreting the “Gang of Nine.”’ Crossing the Pacific: A Collection of Hu Zhuanglin’s Essays on Australian Studies. Beijing: Peking UP, 2016. Huang, Yuanshen. A Unique Literature: A Critical View of Australian Literary Works. Chongqing: Chongqing P, 1995. ———. A History of Australian Literature. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education P, 1997. ———. ‘Publish or Perish? An Overview of the Publication of Australian Material in China.’ Publishing Studies 5 (1997): 36–41. Jose, Nicholas. ‘Australian Literature Inside and Out.’ JASAL spec. iss. (2009): 1–13. . Ni, Weihong. ‘The Circumstantial Straw: On Patrick White and his Fiction.’ Unpublished PhD diss. Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1994.

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David Carter and Paul Sharrad Ouyang, Yu. ‘A Century of Oz Lit in China: A Critical Overview (1906–2008).’ Antipodes 25.1 (2011): 65–71. Pugsley, Peter. ‘Manufacturing the Canon: Australia in the Chinese Literary Imagination.’ Journal of Australian Studies 83 (2004): 89–103. Sharrad, Paul. ‘Convicts, Call Centres and Cochin Kangaroos: Indian Globalising of the Australian Imagination.’ Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader. Ed. Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal. New Delhi: Sports and Spiritual Science Publications, 2009. 571–82. ———. ‘Reconfiguring “Asian Australian” Writing: Australia, India and Inez Baranay.’ Southerly 70.3 (2010): 11–29. ———. ‘Les Murray in a Dhoti: Transnationalising Australian Literature.’ Antipodes 25.1 (2011): 39–46. Sharrad, Paul, and Meeta Chatterjee Padmanabhan, ed. Of Indian Origin: Writings from Australia. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2018. Tang, Zhengqiu, ed. Collection of Chinese Critical Essays on Australian Literature. Shijiazhuang: Hebei Education, 1993. Wang, Guanglin. ‘A Hard-Won Success: Australian Literary Studies in China.’ Antipodes 25.1 (2011): 51–57. ———. Translation in Diasporic Literatures. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Wang, Labao. ‘Australian Literature in China.’ Southerly 60.3 (2000): 118–133. ———, ed. A History of Australian Literary Criticism. Beijing: Chinese Academy of School Sciences, 2016. Xiang, Lan. The Study on the Tradition and Evolution of Australian Eco-Literature. Chengdu: Sichuan UP, 2016. Xu, Daozhi. Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 2018. ———. ‘Liminality and Communitas in Literary Representations of Aboriginal and Asian Encounters.’ Journal of Australian Studies 43.4 (2018): 475–490. Yang, Goubin. ‘Australian Poetry in Chinese Consciousness: A Translator’s Note.’ Notes and Furphies 25 (1990): 6–10. Yang, Yongchun. A Study of Identity in Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Literature. Shanghai: World Publishing, 2012. Ye, Shengnian. Cultural Diversity and Colonialism: Some Aspects of Migrant Fiction in Australia. Shanghai: World Publishing, 2013. Ye, Shengnian, Hua Yan, and Yang Yongchun. Critique of Colonialism: Historical and Cultural Imprints on Australian Fiction. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education P, 2013. Zhan, Chunjuan. ‘A Study of Literary Criticisms on Australian Reconciliation Novels: Carpentaria and The Secret River.’ Unpublished conference paper. Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference, 11–14 July 2017. Melbourne, Australia. Zhao, Jingshen. ‘Modern Australian Literature.’ Short Story Magazine 1 (1929): 333–334. Zhou, Xiaojin. ‘A Critical Survey of Chinese Journal Articles on Australian Literature in China 1979–2016.’ Westerly 62.2 (2017): 250–264. Zhu, Jiongqiang, ed. An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Fiction. Hangzhou: Zhejiang Gongshan UP, 2015. Zhu, Xiaoying. Helen Garner: A Critical Study. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education P, 2013. Zong, Emily Yu. ‘“I Protest, Therefore I Am”: Cosmo-Multiculturalism, Suburban Dreams, and Difference as Abjection in Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon.’ Journal of Intercultural Studies 37.3 (2016): 234–249.

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22 FACING EAST Asia in Australian Literature David Walker

The place of ‘Asia’ as a setting, a presence or point of reference in Australian writing has not been systematically documented. Yet any examination of the history of Australia’s real or imagined responses to Asia demonstrates that from the outset, Australian settlers have been aware of their place in the Asian region (Walker, Anxious Nation). This initial and by no means exhaustive survey examines the presence of Asia in Australian writing drawing upon a specifically compiled database of over 1,000 items. Before analysing this material, however, it is necessary to define what constitutes ‘Asia’ and what should be included here as ‘literature’? Answers will vary, but for present purposes, my focus is on East Asia, South-East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The Middle East, so central to Edward Said’s ‘Orient,’ has not been included. Descriptions of the region to Australia’s north have changed greatly over time: ‘Asia’ has never been a fixed geographical entity with agreed boundaries. Indeed, the term ‘Asia’ was popularised only after the Second World War; before that time, in general commentary ‘the Far East,’ ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Pacific’ were preferred usages. Multiple terms denoted different countries within Asia. China was variously known as the ‘Celestial Empire,’ ‘Cathay’ or the ‘Middle’ or ‘Flowery Kingdom,’ while Japan was known as Nippon or the Mikado (Walker and Sobocinska  9). Whatever the terminology, from the late nineteenth century it was commonly believed that the populations, markets and military ambitions of rising Asia would have a profound influence on Australia’s future. This complex Asia has percolated into many forms of Australian writing. The ‘literary’ genres discussed here have been confined to the following categories: travel writing, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, memoirs and the stories and personal accounts of prisoners of war and members of the military. This survey does not include writing from empirical and disciplinary studies – history, geography, political science or anthropology. Moreover, within my chosen limits, works which have only a passing reference to Asia or to Asian peoples are not included, although where this boundary should be drawn is often unclear. Australians have often written about their travels in Asia. One hundred items in the database focus on their extended journeys through Asia or their discovery of single Asian countries. Of the latter, India was the most popular subject (31%), clearly ahead of East Asia (China 21%, Japan 13%). In the nineteenth century, a time of slow sea voyages and uncomfortable expeditions overland, few Australians could afford to travel but they enjoyed reading about the adventures of those who did. Much of the early travel writing first appeared in serial form in daily newspapers such as the Age, Argus or Sydney Morning Herald, thereby reaching a wide audience. Thirteen travel books appeared before 1900, notably James Hingston’s handsome, beautifully bound two-volume work, 215

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The Australian Abroad on Branches from the Main Routes around the World (1879). This was complemented by maps and striking etchings of notable Asian buildings and landmarks. Beautiful as they were, the two volumes were too bulky for the traveller. A Melbourne publisher soon brought out a compact single-volume edition. Hingston was a brilliant, witty polymath who had read everything and forgotten nothing. From his base at a Melbourne hotel, he commanded a vast array of literary and historical references. He was particularly attracted to India, which for him had the appeal of the Arabian nights, that ‘famous entertainer of our youth’ (Hingston 21) He found India to be the home of ‘all that was imaginative, fantastic, sensuous and extravagant’ (21). For voracious Australian readers of the nineteenth century, India, as the jewel in the crown of Britain’s empire, was a source of immense fascination. One figure who greatly admired Hingston’s writing about India was Alfred Deakin, Prime Minister of Australia on three occasions before the First World War and himself the author of two books on India (Temple and Tomb in India [1893] and Irrigated India [1893]). Hingston believed that it was impossible to understand the human condition without knowing India, a comment that aligned with Deakin’s interest in Theosophical teachings and matters spiritual. For Deakin, India offered the brilliant spectacle of British power, valour and enterprise, a key theme in Irrigated India. In the 1890s, anticipating a closer connection between Australia and India in trade, travel and education, he went so far as to refer to Australia as ‘Southern Asia.’ As the early decades of the twentieth century approached, Australia’s appreciation of India slowly faded, overtaken by a growing fascination with Japan. Japan’s rise was widely regarded as a modern miracle. Dai Nippon or Great Japan began to be hailed as the ‘Britain of the East.’ One traveller who exploited this interest was the Oxford-educated Douglas Sladen. After struggling to popularise Australian poetry in three anthologies in 1888, he set out, camera in hand, for intriguing Japan. His first book on Japan, The Japs at Home (1895), was an immediate success and further books soon followed. For Sladen, Japan was a land of ‘fairy-tales’ (43–44). He loved Nikko with its ‘sky-blue river, running beneath the sacred scarlet bridge… Exquisite!’ (40). Australian travel writing about Asia continued to flourish through the twentieth century. Books appearing before 1950 include Mary Gaunt’s A Woman in China (1914) and A Broken Journey (1919), G.C. Dixon’s From Melbourne to Moscow (1925), Frank Clune’s Sky High to Shanghai (1939) and the journalist George Johnston’s Journey through Tomorrow (1947). Born on the Victorian goldfields, Gaunt confessed to a ‘wander fever in my blood’ (1). As a child she was fascinated by the curios brought home from the East by her grandfather, a ‘sailor in the honourable East India Company’s service’ (1). Growing up, she devoured every travel book she could get hold of. Then, on becoming a widow without means, this adventurous woman set out to see the world for herself. After completing her first book describing travels in Africa, she headed for China. There was a family connection to Australia’s famous Times correspondent, George Ernest Morrison of Peking. He invited Mary to stay. Morrison already had a reputation as a formidable pedestrian. In An Australian in China: Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma (1895), he recounts his 4828 kilometre trek. Gaunt reached China by train, travelling from London through Russia, then from Mukden (now Shenyang) in northern China to what was then known as Peking. In the early 1920s, the young lawyer, Dixon, went in the opposite direction. Sailing ‘the Eastern seas in the wake of Drake and Tasman’ (Dixon 12) he travelled from Melbourne, through the East Indies to Japan, Korea and China then on to Russia. His travel stories were serialised in the Melbourne Herald, the Sydney Sun and the Brisbane Daily Mail before appearing in book form. Meeting important people was a goal for travel writers. Dixon met Dr Sun Yat-sen, first President of the new Republic of China and the ‘Old Marshal,’ Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin), a famous warlord and power broker. By 1925, when From Melbourne to Moscow appeared, the camera had become an essential accessory.

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Accordingly, Dixon’s book is well illustrated with photographs both of landscapes ‘the Nankow Pass, north of Pekin’ and people ‘Chinese bandits at Harbin’ (128, 192). One of the most popular and prolific Australian travel writers was Frank Clune. He wrote eight books describing his extensive travels in Asia from Sky High to Shanghai (1939) to Flight to Formosa (1958). Clune, an accountant by profession, saw his books as money-spinning ventures. Most began as radio broadcasts for the ABC. These proved very popular as Clune had a good eye for arresting facts and new adventures. He was well aware that Australians had taken to radio with enthusiasm. It now brought the world into people’s living rooms creating, in turn, a readership for his travel writing. These radio scripts were turned into popular books with the help of Clune’s ghostwriter, the controversial literary figure and publisher, P.R. Stephensen. By the mid-1930s, Australia was developing its own tentative response to the Asian region through the newly formed Department of External Affairs. Clune was successful in securing introductions and travel subsidies from the Department which regarded him as a useful travelling salesman for White Australia, particularly in India. Clune also gained support from the growing international air carrier, Qantas, in return for endorsements. Clune’s larrikin, knockabout persona as a travel writer and broadcaster brought the geography, peoples and markets of ‘Awakening Asia’ to a wide Australian audience. His timing could hardly have been better. In 1939, the year when Sky High to Shanghai was published, Australia’s new Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, used his first radio broadcast to advise Australians to start thinking about the pressing geopolitical reality of Asia, a region that they should no longer refer to as the ‘Far East’ because it was in reality their ‘Near North’ (Walker, Stranded Nation 44). Despite growing Australian interest and the high popularity of his books, Clune maintained his enthusiasm for travel in Asia only while it still seemed possible for Australia to play a leadership role in the region. From the 1940s, as Asian decolonisation intensified and criticism of the White Australia policy grew more vociferous, he became increasing angry over the declining authority of the ‘white man.’ The new Asia repelled him. While Clune withdrew from imaginative engagement with Asia, the well-known war correspondent and author, George Johnston, saw Asia as Australia’s future, an emphasis evident in his influential travel book Journey through Tomorrow (1947). This idea was not new. By the 1940s it already had a considerable history. Versions of Australia’s Asian future continue to echo. That we know too little of Asia and urgently need to know more is an infinitely adaptable formulation, a common thread found throughout all forms of Australian writing about the region. In 1949, when Chairman Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China, the face of Asia dramatically changed. China turned ‘Red,’ closed to most Australian visitors while Japan, the former enemy, was rehabilitated as a new democracy and an important barrier to the spread of communism through East and South-East Asia. In the 1950s, the author Colin Simpson responded to Australians’ growing interest in Japan, as the dangerous adversary reemerged as a trading partner. One of Simpson’s best-known travel books, The Country Upstairs (1956), appeared just as a new trade agreement was about to be signed between Australia and Japan. In referring to Japan as the country ‘upstairs,’ Simpson highlighted a proximity that meant developments in Japan would impact on Australians. Another Asian country that was changing rapidly following decolonisation was Indonesia, once the Netherlands East Indies. Maslyn Williams, a documentary filmmaker and travel writer, produced five books on this region from Five Journeys from Jakarta: Inside Sukarno’s Indonesia (1965) to Faces of My Neighbour: Three Journeys into East Asia (1975). His reference to neighbours was a further and, at the time, quite common appeal for Australians to realise Asia’s proximity. The travel writing of authors like Clune, Simpson and Williams had an implicit educational motivation: in the 1950s and 1960s Australians had to know their neighbours. There was growing appreciation in government and literary circles that Australians needed to distance themselves

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from racially charged and old-fashioned references to the ‘yellow peril’ and to claims to white superiority. The educational imperative in travel writing then began to change from the 1970s as travel in Asia became much easier and cheaper, particularly for young Australians willing to ‘go native’ and wanting a good time. Writer and satirist Richard Neville described the adventures to be had on the overland trip to London via India and Nepal in Hippy Hippy Shake (1995). Asia was a colourful backdrop to his message about generational change. Through the twenty-first century, Australian travel writing on Asia has declined. More Australians now travel and can see Asia for themselves, assisted by travel guides, notably from Lonely Planet. Moreover, written sources of information are now augmented by up-to-the-minute online reviews on every aspect of the travel experience. One of the great impulses for Australians to travel in Asia was war. During the First World War, Australian soldiers who had rushed to join the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) to get overseas were known as ‘seven-bob-a-day tourists.’ Seventy books dealt with prisoner of war or personal military experience in Asia. Like memoirs and the writings of foreign correspondents discussed below, this category is male dominated. Most works deal with Japan (32%), or with experiences in South-East Asia (Singapore/Malaysia: 21%), Burma/Thailand (10%) or Vietnam (23%). Books in this group include R.M. Allen’s Mesopotamia and India (1916), Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo (1946), Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island (1952), Betty Jeffrey’s White Coolies (1954), Rhys Pollard’s The Cream Machine (1972), Keith Wilson’s You’ll Never Get Off the Island (1989) and John Ratcliffe’s Biting Through (2014). Rivett’s best-seller, Behind Bamboo, gave the first account of the Australian prisoner of war experience under the Japanese in the Second World War. It was a savage account of Japanese barbarity from a writer who later became an advocate of immigration reform and closer ties with Asia. Even more popular was Braddon’s prisoner-of-war novel, The Naked Island, describing conditions at the Changi camp in Singapore and on the Burma-Thai railroad. Several years later, his views had mellowed for its sequel, End of a Hate (1958). Women contribute only five texts in the prisoner of war/military category, one of the earliest being Jeffrey’s White Coolies. Jeffrey was an Australian Army nursing sister captured by the Japanese and imprisoned for over three years in Sumatra. Her title plays on the idea of the role reversal suffered by white Australians forced to serve Japanese masters. While most of the books in this category deal with the Second World War, one fifth derived from Australia’s involvement with the war in Vietnam. William Nagel, who had served in Vietnam for almost four years, as a soldier, cook and member of the elite Special Air Service Regiment (SAS), wrote of his experience in highly colloquial language in The Odd Angry Shot (1975). Another soldier, Bob Buick, wrote of his experiences in training, fighting and returning home in All Guts and No Glory: The Story of a Long Tan Warrior (2000). Further works in this genre continue to emerge as Australians fight new wars in Asia. For example, John Ratcliffe, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, has described his experiences over five years in Afghanistan in Biting Through (2014). In a related category, there are 87 memoirs. This category includes books by war correspondents and the life writing of missionaries, diplomats, academics, doctors and scientists who had lived and worked in Asia. Over the entire period, most works were set in East Asia (China 28%, Japan/ Korea 17%). Books on India or Burma comprised 15%, Vietnam (13%) and Indonesia/Malaysia/ Singapore (10%). Works by women account for one fifth of this category. These include Helen Palmer’s Australian Teacher in China (1953), Mabel Brookes’s Crowded Galleries (1956), Maie Casey’s Tides and Eddies (1966) and Myra Roper’s China: The Surprising Country (1966). Unsurprisingly, few books in this category were written in the years before Federation, a notable exception being James ‘Rajah’ Inglis’s Tent Life in Tigerland (1888). A member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Inglis was a free trader who had made a fortune as a tea importer. He had quite a flair for publicity, standing out from the crowd in his colourful Indian turban. Although Australian 218

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journalists reported on conflicts in Asia from the 1890s, few in these early years brought their newspaper articles together as books. One of the earliest Australian war correspondents was the poet A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson who, after reporting on the Boer War, travelled to Peking in 1901 to write for the Sydney Morning Herald on the Boxer Rebellion. One fifth of the memoirs appeared between 1900 and 1950. Most of these books came from war correspondents. One of the most notable and now largely unknown was written by the West Australian journalist Rhodes Farmer, whose book Shanghai Harvest: Three Years in the China War (1945) was praised by George Orwell. Farmer had started out in 1937 on what he thought was a holiday, only to find himself in Shanghai at the start of the second Sino-Japanese war. He quickly became a war correspondent and then an advisor in one of the ministries of the Nationalist Government. He admired China’s resistance to the Japanese claiming: ‘China saved the world from a carving knife wielded by Germany and Japan’ (Farmer 294). Life writing by politicians in these decades includes Thomas Playford’s Notes of Travel in India, China and Japan (1907) and Richard Casey’s An Australian in India (1947). Playford represented South Australia as a senator in the federal parliament and was the grandfather of Sir Thomas Playford, long-term Premier of South Australia. Casey was a leading figure in conservative politics and Minister for External Affairs in the Menzies government. An Australian in India is based on his experiences as Governor of Bengal from 1944 to 1946. Two thirds of the memoirs were written after 1950. Books by war correspondents increased during this period as Australian newspapers extended their coverage of Asian affairs by posting journalists into the region. Representative titles include Norman Bartlett’s With the Australians in Korea (1954), Wilfred Burchett’s Vietnam North (1966), Richard Hughes’s Foreign Devil (1972), Ian Moffit’s Deadlines (1985) and Denis Warner’s Wake Me If There’s Trouble (1995). Some of these journalists were bitter rivals, torn by the tensions of the Cold War. Two of the most prolific, Burchett and Warner, remained lifelong adversaries. More recent publications in this genre include ABC journalist Helene Chung’s Ching Chong China Girl: From Fruit Shop to China Correspondent (2008). Diplomats serving in Asia often wrote memoirs, including Walter Crocker’s Australian Ambassador (1971), Alison Broinowski’s Take One Ambassador (1973) and Stephen FitzGerald’s Comrade Ambassador: Whitlam’s Beijing Envoy (2015). Crocker was Australia’s most senior diplomat during the 1950s and 1960s with two postings as Head of Mission to India and another to Indonesia. His great regret was not to have been appointed as Australia’s first Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. This honour went to FitzGerald, Australian Ambassador to China from 1973 until 1976. Broinowski held diplomatic posts in Manila, Tokyo and Seoul. Many academics have also written about their experiences in Asia including C.P. Fitzgerald’s Why China? (1985), Humphrey McQueen’s Tokyo World: An Australian Diary (1991) and Basil S. Hetzl’s Chance and Commitment: Memoirs of a Medical Scientist (2005). From the 1950s until the 1970s, the British-born Fitzgerald was Australia’s foremost sinologist. McQueen is a historian and writer who held a visiting position at the University of Tokyo. Hetzl was a leading medical researcher known for his work throughout Asia in combatting diseases like goitre and cretinism caused by iodine deficiency. Until the late twentieth century, Asia was commonly imagined as an external presence looking in or at Australia, posing questions about race, place and belonging for a predominantly white settler society. During the twenty-first century, there has been a growing interest in the Asia ‘within,’ as Australians of Asian heritage examine their family background with multiple points of connection to Australian life. Notable is Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing (2003), a fictionalised account of his family’s life in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau from the 1930s to the 1960s. In Growing up Asian in Australia (2008), Alice Pung has collected stories from many Asian-Australian authors across the country. Contributors include Cindy Pan, Tony Ayres, Benjamin Law, Kylie Kwong, Jason Yat-sen Li, John So, Anh Do and Jenny Kee. Born to Chinese parents in Cambodia, Pung has also contributed three memoirs: Unpolished Gem (2006), Her Father’s Daughter (2013) and Close to Home (2018). 219

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Imaginative writing forms the largest volume of work by Australians about Asia. In total, 292 works of general fiction were identified, over a quarter of these written by women. Over half of the novels are set in East Asia, particularly in China (33%) and Japan (20%). Fewer are set in the Indian subcontinent (including Ceylon/Sri Lanka) (15%). Works set in South-East Asia (Indonesia/Malaysia/Singapore) account for 12% and Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia, 8%. Very few works discuss South Korea. Despite a strong economic relationship in the twenty-first century, historical and cultural ties between Korea and Australia have been relatively weak and certainly weaker than relations between Australia and mainland China, Japan, India or Indonesia. Only 17 novels written before 1900 appear in the database. This number could well be increased as researchers find more stories serialised in newspapers, a common practice at this time. Asia-related serials have not yet been systematically documented. Early novels on Asia were usually set either in India, a result of interest in the British Raj, or in Japan, as a response to the lure of japonisme. Works include John George Lang’s Will He Marry Her? (1858), Carlton Dawe’s Rose and Chrysanthemum (1898) and Guy Boothby’s Doctor Nikola (1896). In these nineteenth-century novels Asia generally appears merely as an exotic backdrop to the main action of the novel’s European characters. Asian characters are either absent, quaint and not well-rounded, or frankly sinister. Boothby, a prolific expatriate writer, specialised in malevolent oriental masterminds, as did his contemporary Albert Dorrington, creator of Doctor Tsarka (The Radium Terrors [1912]). Doctors Nikola and Tsarka were precursors of the dreaded and much more famous Doctor Fu Manchu. One Australian writer who moved beyond the prevailing Asian stereotypes was Rosa Campbell Praed. In Madame Izan: A Tourist Story (1899), Praed draws a more nuanced portrait of a cultured Japanese gentleman. Meanwhile, her European characters epitomise the modern traveller as they tour exotic Japan with their guide books and cameras. Throughout, Praed offers a clever satire on ‘yellow peril’ anxieties, masculine hubris and racial prejudices. Fifty-two novels were written between 1900 and 1949. Over half of these were set in East Asia, particularly in China/Hong Kong/Tibet. Japan remained a popular setting but Korea continued to attract very few writers. Interest in India was declining and only six novels were set in Indonesia. Once again, in popular fiction, Asian locations like India (Guy Boothby’s My Indian Queen [1900]), Indonesia (H.E. Quinn’s That Woman from Java [1916]), Japan (A.G. Hales’s The Little Blue Pigeon [1905]) or China (Charles Cooper’s The Soul of Tak-Min [1935]) were exploited for their exotic appeal. Hales was a popular writer in the early twentieth century who saw the possibilities of stories on Japan. His Little Blue Pigeon focused on the lowly status of Japanese women, the cruelty of their menfolk who treated them as mere ‘chattels’ and the chivalrous role European men could play in righting such wrongs, a common orientalist trope. An even more prolific author whose books were set in Asia during this period was F.J. Thwaites, a boy from Balmain who wrote 31 popular romantic adventure novels, including The Redemption (1936) and Shadows over Rangoon (1941). The Redemption presents the plight of Terry Gordon, ‘the white derelict of Bombay’ (49), whose comments on India and Indians were strikingly derogatory. In the 1930s and 1940s, Cooper wrote many detective or spy novels with Asian settings. Unlike Thwaites or Hales, he encouraged his readers to take a more respectful attitude to Asian cultures, dedicating By Command of Yee-Shing (1937) to ‘those who can see and appreciate, virtues in other races, and beauty in other creeds, as well as their own.’ More substantive novels written in this period include Mollie Skinner’s Tucker Sees India (1937) and Charmian Clift’s High Valley (1949). Tucker Sees India is based on Skinner’s experience working as a nurse in Indian hospitals during the First World War. Her focus is on the adventures of Tucker, a rough-and-ready Australian character, and the responses he elicits from the imperial British. Minor Indian characters like Ali Mohammed remain sketchy. Clift collaborated with Johnston in writing High Valley, a cross between a quest story and a fantasy novel set in Tibet but with strong locational details provided by Johnston.

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Much of the serialised fiction on Asia in the first half of the twentieth century remains to be documented. One recent find is The Poison of Polygamy by Wong Shee Ping. This was serialised in 1909–1910 in the Melbourne Chinese-language newspaper, The Chinese Times, and is the earliest piece dealing with the Chinese-Australian experience written from a Chinese perspective. It has been republished recently in both English and Chinese by Sydney University Press (2019). Wong was a newspaperman, Chinese republican and Christian whose father, a successful Melbourne businessman, had come to Australia as a gold miner. One hundred and sixty-three novels were written between 1950 and 1999. Once again, half were set in East Asia, including 50 in China/Hong Kong and 30 in Japan. Few novels were set in the Indian subcontinent (12%). A growing number now concerned South-East Asia (28%), particularly Vietnam. It is not easy to explain the continuing decline of interest in India. There were certainly big themes available as the glamour of the British Raj was replaced by the confronting complexities of independent India. One notable success in writing about India and the problems of transcultural understanding came with Janette Turner Hospital’s The Ivory Swing (1977). Another is David Foster’s Plumbum: The Ultimate Heavy Metal Experience (1983), set in Mumbai. Dramatic changes swept across Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. Decolonisation set in train by the Second World War continued apace. European powers retreated in haste from the region leaving white Australia exposed as never before as an ‘outpost of Europe.’ The case for knowing the ‘neighbours’ intensified, growing urgent as criticism of Australia’s restrictive immigration programme increased both domestically and from Asia, particularly from India. Government initiatives were introduced to improve Australia’s image: the Colombo Plan, an Asian Visitors programme, more broadcasts by Radio Australia into Asia and the appearance of a new glossy magazine, Hemisphere: An Australian Asian Magazine (1957–1972). Across the 15 years of its existence, Hemisphere published accounts of Australians in Asia and of Asian students and visitors in Australia. Asia-related novels published in this period include both popular and more substantive works. They include T.A.G. Hungerford’s Sowers of the Wind (1954), Hal Porter’s A Handful of Pennies (1958), Morris West’s The Ambassador (1965), C.J. Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), Blanche D’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach (1981), Castro’s Birds of Passage (1983) and Alex Miller’s The Ancestor Game (1992). Both Hungerford’s and Porter’s novels dealt with Australians’ experience of the British Commonwealth post-war occupation of Japan. In the 1950s, West emerged as a bestselling international author. His book The Ambassador, set in Vietnam, has been compared favourably with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955). Jon Cleary, West’s contemporary, also wrote for the international market. His Asia-related novels include The High Commissioner (1966), High Road to China (1966), The Long Pursuit (1969), A Very Private War (1980), The Far Away Drums (1981), The Phoenix Tree (1984) and Dragons at the Party (1987). While West’s and Cleary’s novels featured plausible Asian characters, work by Koch, D’Alpuget, Castro, and Miller did rather more in bringing Asian settings and subject matter into the mainstream of Australian literature. Koch also contributed a substantial body of writing and critical reflection on the place of Asia in the Australian imaginary. His The Year of Living Dangerously is set in politically turbulent Jakarta undergoing a coup d’etat in 1965. D’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach concerns a young Australian journalist visiting Malaysia to cover the plight of stranded Vietnamese Boat People. Castro’s Birds of Passage tells of a Chinese-Australian man seeking the story of his ancestor who came to Australia from China in the 1880s seeking gold. Miller’s The Ancestor Game delves into the interconnectedness of China and Australia’s past via the interwoven personal histories of its three main protagonists. Sixty novels were written after the year 2000. The proportion about East Asia (65%) continues to grow, particularly books about China/Tibet (38%). Nine novels were set in the Indian subcontinent and twelve in South-East Asia; only two were set in Vietnam. Titles include Nicholas Jose’s

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The Red Thread (2000), Janet Watson’s The Hindustan Contessa (2002) and Bruce Grant’s Crossing the Arafura Sea (2015), all of which deal with interracial relationships. In 1986, Jose taught Australian literature to students at Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing and East China Normal University, Shanghai. He travelled extensively through China. The Red Thread takes the relationship between a westernised Shanghai antiques dealer and a sinophile Australian woman and pairs this with the story of two Chinese lovers as depicted in the pages of Six Records of a Floating Life (1806), a classical Chinese work by Shen Fu. Watson’s novel The Hindustan Contessa describes an Australian woman married to a man of Bengali background and explores complex relationships with his family, while Grant’s Crossing the Arafura Sea is the romantic tale of an Australian man and a woman from Indonesia. One of the more persistent themes in Asia-related Australian writing are the stories of invasion. The database identifies 52 items. Some dealt with a generic Asia or with invasions by unspecified Asiatic aliens, but where particular invaders were clearly identified, they addressed invasions from Indonesia (31%), China (25%) or Japan (15%). Seven titles, mainly early works, included threats from a Russian-Asian collaboration. None of the works dealt with Indian invaders or invaders from parts of South-East Asia other than Indonesia. India was thought to be safely under British control down to the 1940s. Indonesia was considered safe so long as the Dutch held sway, but became dangerously close and worryingly volatile after independence. Ten invasion novels were written before 1900, mainly warning of invasion by China. While Japan had emerged as a rising military and naval power in the Pacific, defeating China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, no writer identified Japan as an invader in this early period. Stories focused on Chinese invasion include William Lane’s White or Yellow? A Story of the Race War of AD 1908 (1888) and Kenneth MacKay’s The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia (1895). Lane’s story, set in Brisbane, was first serialised in the labour movement paper, The Boomerang. Though differing in their politics, Lane and MacKay both saw the bushman as the first line of defence against the invader, a theme often repeated in the poetry of Henry Lawson and in later invasion stories. Thirteen invasion novels were written between 1900 and 1949. Four drew upon generalised Asian or alien invaders, five pictured Chinese invasions, while another five now imagined Japanese invasions. These include Thomas Roydhouse’s The Coloured Conquest (1904), A.L. Pullar’s Celestalia: A Fantasy AD 1975 (1933) and John Wallace’s Invasion (1940). Roydhouse advanced the idea that just as white had replaced black so too would ‘yellow’ replace white. His unfolding plot suggests that Australian women were far too susceptible to oriental charm, a weakness that endangered the security of the nation. One third of the invasion stories were written between 1950 and 1999 showing continued interest in this subject. Of these, over half concerned invasions from Indonesia, four stories now singled out China, while only two pictured Japan as the invader. Examples include John Hay’s The Invasion (1968), John Vader’s The Battle of Sydney (1971) and John Marsden’s series for young adults beginning with Tomorrow When the War Began (1993). Nine invasion stories have appeared since 2000. Again, over half of these dealt with invasion by Indonesians, including David Rollins’s Rogue Element (2003) and Keith McArdle’s The Reckoning: The Day Australia Fell (2013). The idea that Australia is in danger of being ‘swamped’ or ‘taken over’ has become a commonplace of right-wing politics. Most invasion writing focuses on national strengths and limitations. It invites questions about how the nation’s state of preparedness and the people best placed to defeat the enemy. These are nation-building discourses emphasising the need to populate and defend ‘empty’ Australia. Where the bush is depicted as the source of national strength, the city was viewed as shallow, commercial and morally defective. With an invasion typically predicted to take place in the near future, these stories reinforce a more generalised preoccupation with Asia as Australia’s future. While invasion stories invoked Asia as a threat they fail to realistically depict specific Asian cultures. Naming 222

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the enemy country China, Japan or Indonesia did not make it readily recognisable by any of its citizens reading the book. Many Australian writers wrote collections of short stories set in Asia. This was a popular form for women, who wrote over 40% of the 67 collections noted. The most favoured settings were the Indian subcontinent (34%) or East Asia (33%). Nine collections were set in Indonesia/Malaysia/ Singapore and others in Vietnam or the Philippines. One of the earliest collections was by Ca rlton Dawe, Kakemonos: Tales of the Far East (1897). Sixteen collections of short stories about Asia appeared between 1900 and 1949. Around 40% were set in India, including Agnes Littlejohn’s The Breath of India and Other Stories (1914). Half the short story collections appeared between 1950 and 1999, many now set in China or Japan. Examples include Mona Brand’s Daughters of Vietnam (1958), Porter’s Mr Butterfly and Other Tales of New Japan (1970), Yasmine Gooneratne’s Tales from Sri Lanka (1979) and Merlinda Bobis’s White Turtle (1999). Short story collections appearing after 2000 include Nam Le’s The Boat (2008) and Isobel Li’s Chinese Affair (2016). Twenty-six plays were written about Asia. Numbers included in this genre have been relatively difficult to capture as many plays may not have been published. Others may have appeared as scripts for radio or television dramas and these have not been canvassed here. Over a third of the plays identified were set in China, while one fifth were set in Japan. No plays with an Indian setting were found. Most plays were written between 1950 and 1999. The earliest plays continue the invasion theme, as in Randolph Bedford’s White Australia or The Empty North (1909) and Francis Rawdon Chesney Hopkins’s Reaping the Whirlwind: An Australian Patriotic Drama for Australian People (1909). Later writing, like Oscar Ashe’s Chu Chin Chow (1917), provide exotic entertainment. More serious depictions of Asia did not emerge in Australian plays until the 1960s, as in Russel Oakes’s As Enduring as the Camphor Tree (1967), John Romeril’s The Floating World (1975), Alexander Buzo’s Makassar Reef (1979) and Thérèse Radic’s Madame Mao (1986). Poetry is a favoured genre for Australian writers imaging Asia. Two hundred and seventy items were identified, both individual poems and collections of poetry. Almost one quarter were written by women. Little of this poetry appeared between 1900 and 1949, and was mainly about China and Japan. Most poems (173 works) were written between 1950 and 1999, set largely in China, Japan/Korea or India/Ceylon/Burma. One fifth were about Vietnam. Poems about China include Francis Adams’s ‘A Glimpse of China’ in Songs of the Army of the Night (1888), Edward Dyson’s ‘Ah Ling the Leper’ in Rhymes of the Mines (1896), Geoffrey Lehman’s ‘Emperor Mao and the Sparrows’ in The Ilex Tree (1965), and Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s ‘Tian An Men Square’ and ‘Peasant Painters’ in Kath Walker in China (1988). Harold Stewart’s early interest in Chinese art and poetry is attested in his poetry collection Phoenix Wings: Poems, 1940–46 (1948). Poems about Japan include John Dunmore Langford’s ‘To the Commodore of the Russian Squadron’ in Poems Sacred and Secular (1873), Paterson’s ‘The Pearl Diver’ in Rio Grande’s Last Race and Other Verses (1902), Lesbia Harford’s ‘XLII A Blouse Machinist’ in The Poems of Lesbia Harford (1941), and Les Murray’s ‘Young General Macarthur in a Coonskin Coat’ in Conscious and Verbal (1999). In 1938 Hugh McCrae brought out a collection of poems, The Mimshi Maiden, loosely based on Japan and describing the fantastical encounter of a ‘Mimshi maiden’ with a ‘whisker-curling evil-omened tiger-fellow’ (96). In writing poems about Japan, some Australians explored the traditional techniques of Japanese poetry, as did Denis Riley in Five Songs on Japanese Haiku: Soprano, Clarinet in A, Violincello (1971). Harold Stewart, who lived in Kyoto for the last 29 years of his life, became most deeply immersed in Japanese culture. From his involvement with Pure Land Buddhism came several books of poetry, including The Exiled Immortal. A Song-Cycle (1980) and By the Walls of Old Kyoto: A Yearly Cycle of Landscape Poems with Prose Commentaries (1981). Many poets have also written about India. Their poems include Francis Adams’s ‘To India’ in Songs of the Army of the Night (1888), V.J. Daley’s ‘The Quest of Brahma’ in Wine and Roses (1911), Lawson’s ‘Booth’s Drum’ in My Army, O, My Army! and Other Songs (1915) and Murray’s ‘The 223

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Antipodes of India’ in Poems the Size of Photographs (2002). Writers who produced collections of poetry with Indian themes include Rodney Hall’s Law of Karma (1968), Vicky Viidikas’s Wrappings (1974) and Jeri Kroll’s Indian Movies (1982). Vietnam has also provided imagery for Australian poets, particularly in relation to experiences of war. Single poems include Kate Jennings’s ‘Moratorium: Front Lawn: 1970’ in Come to Me My Melancholy Baby (1975), Tim Thorn’s ‘XIX’ in The Atlas (1982) and Jamie Grant’s ‘How to Fold Army Blankets’ in The Refinery (1985). Collections of poetry dealing with Vietnam include Len Fox’s Gum Leaves and Bamboo (1959) and Jane Gibian’s Long Shadows (2013). Among publishers, the independent Giramondo Publishing Company has been committed to literature’s engagement with Asia. They have brought out works by Australian authors with Asian themes and works by Asian Australians. The genres cover a wide field: travel writing, novels, collections of short stories and poetry. Travel writing brought out by Giramondo includes Kim Cheng Boey’s Between Stations (2009). This describes Boey’s journey from his birthplace in Singapore, through India, China and the Middle East before making his home in Australia. Novels from Giramondo include the Vietnamese-born Chi Vu’s Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale (2012), Christopher Raja’s The Burning Elephant (2015), Michelle Cahill’s Letter to Passoa (2016) and five novels by Castro. Anguli Ma is a thriller based on a figure from a Buddhist folk-tale; The Burning Elephant is set in Kolkata, while the many settings of Letter to Passoa include Chang Mai and Kathmandu. Two recent novels from Castro with Asian themes are Street to Street (2012) and Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria (2017). Collections of short stories from Giramondo include Jess Huon’s The Dark Wet (2011), exploring the circumstances of a young woman in India, and Jose’s Bapo (2014), which has Chinese themes. Giramondo’s extensive poetry list includes many works relating to Asia: Judith Beveridge’s Wolf Notes (2003) and Devadatta’s Poems (2014), Adam Aitken’s Eighth Habitation (2009), John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians (2011), Lachlan Brown’s Lunar Inheritance (2017) and Eunice Andrada’s Flood Damages (2018). Additionally, Giramondo published the literary magazine Heat (1996–2011) which included Asia-related material. Australia’s imaginative engagement with Asia has a long, complex and intriguing history. It moves between the idea of Asia as a threatening geopolitical presence with the power to destroy Australian society and culture to a source of adventure, cultural awakening, spiritual renewal and cross-cultural enquiry. In reflecting on Asia, many writers also develop and refine their understanding of what it means to be Australian. In some of this writing, Asia merely serves as a backdrop while for other authors Asian characters, settings and cultures are deeply explored. Over the last 20 years, the writing of Australians of Asian backgrounds has formed an increasingly prominent part of Australian literature. It is now impossible to conceive of Australian ‘literature’ without paying close attention to Australia’s Asia-Pacific setting.

Works Cited Cooper, Charles. By Command of Yee-Shing. Sydney, NSW: W.E. Smith, 1937. Dixon, G.C. From Melbourne to Moscow. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1925. Farmer, Rhodes. Shanghai Harvest: Three Years in the China War. London: Museum, 1945. Gaunt, Mary. A Woman in China. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914. Hingston, James. The Australian Abroad on Branches from the Main Routes around the World. London: Samson, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1897. McCrae, Hugh. The Mimshi Maiden. Sydney, NSW: Halsted, 1938. Sladen, Douglas. Twenty Years of My Life. London: Constable, 1915. Thwaites, F.J. The Redemption. Sydney, NSW: New Century, 1936. Walker, David. Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1999. ———. Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region. Perth, WA: UWA, 2019. Walker, David, and Agnieszka Sobocinska, ed. Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century. Perth: U of Western Australia P, 2012.

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Key Themes in Australian Writing

23 TURNING THE INSIDE OUT Interiority and Australian Fiction Peter D. Mathews

The concept of interiority is difficult to define in Australian literature because of the numerous ways this term might be interpreted. For many Australians, for instance, the notion of an interior would bring to mind the Australian landscape, especially the dry and rugged interior of the outback. Whereas it is customary to think of the centre of a nation – its core, its heartland – as representing the nucleus of its culture and values, the hostility of the Australian interior and the outback’s remoteness places it outside the experience of most inhabitants. The majority of modern Australia’s population clings to the coast, to the greener fringes of the continent. The Australian geographical imaginary thus reverses the customary national mythology of the heartland, for its interior is typically thought of as remote, hostile, unknown. As a result, journeys into the interior of the landscape in Australian literature are marked by a recurring motif of erasure and disappearance as portrayed in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), David Malouf ’s Remembering Babylon (1993), and Suzanne McCourt’s The Lost Child (2014), to name but a few examples. A second important meaning of interiority in Australian literature comes from the use of this term in the construction of human identity, referring to the boundaries that divide the self from the Other. At first, such a division seems simple enough, with what is ‘interior’ belonging to the self and what is ‘exterior’ attributed to the Other. However, this easy division has repeatedly been undermined in modern thought by what Sigmund Freud describes as a series of ‘outrages’ against humanity’s ‘naïve self-love’ (246). Freud points to three memorable ‘outrages’ in particular: Copernicus’s discovery of heliocentrism, which demonstrated that earth is not the centre of the universe; Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which showed that humanity is not the pinnacle of creation; and Freud’s theory of the unconscious, which reveals that even our deepest thoughts are often obscure to us. Interiority has not disappeared as a subjective construct, so much as it has been complicated by the way that what is thought to be external frequently reappears in the field of the subject. Language is a classic example: human beings use language to express their most intimate thoughts, yet these words and ideas are not really their own, since they are borrowed from the Other, from someone else. ‘Je est un autre’ (‘I is an other’), the French poet Arthur Rimbaud famously wrote in one of his letters, a principle that encapsulates a European modernity with which Australian literature repeatedly finds itself in dialogue. The finest examples of Australian fiction tend to blend together these two meanings of interiority – the geographical and the subjective – into a meditation on the complex interplay between the internal and external. One of the most famous examples of this strategy occurs in Patrick White’s classic novel Voss (1957), in which the eponymous main character heads out on an ill-fated expedition into the Australian outback. White based his protagonist on the German 227

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explorer Ludwig Leichardt who, like Voss, mysteriously disappeared in 1848 while travelling in the outback, never to be seen again. White brilliantly adds to the skeleton of Leichardt’s story by adorning Voss with religious and philosophical themes so that his journey becomes a doomed trek not only into the unknown heart of the Australian landscape, but also into the obscurity of his own self. The hard reality of the material world is overlaid with a metaphysical symbolism, such as the mystical visions by which Voss and Laura, despite their physical separation, are able to communicate. A similar subversion of the boundaries between the exteriority of the physical and the interiority of the psychological can be found in many other famous works of Australian fiction. In Tim Winton’s In the Winter Dark (1988), for instance, the narrator, Maurice Stubbs, recounts how the small community of Sink is menaced by a mysterious threat. Although the story is told in first person by Stubbs, the interiority of his thoughts and memories becomes strangely intermingled with those of his neighbours. Stubbs tries to explain: This is what I remember, but it’s not only my story. It happened to Ida, too, and Jaccob and the girl Ronnie. It’s strange how other people’s memories become your own. You recall things they’ve told you. You go over things until you think you can see the joins, the cells of it all. And there’s dreams. I have these dreams. Dead people, broken people bleed things into you, like there’s some pressure point because they can’t get it out any more, can’t get it told. It’s as though the things which need telling seep across to you in your sleep. Suddenly you have dreams about things that happened to them, not to you, as if it isn’t rough enough holding down your own secrets. I don’t know how it works – I’m no witch-doctor – but I know I remember things I can’t possibly know. (2) Like in Voss, Winton’s blurring of the lines between inside and outside is given a religious symbolism, with Stubbs twice directly comparing his combined memories of the community’s terror to the biblical madman in Luke 5:9, whose demons famously professed: ‘My name is Legion: for we are many.’ In such cases of possession, it is the outside, the Other, who takes hold of the subject’s interior and speaks. Winton’s celebrated novel Cloudstreet (1991) also experiments, in a different way, with the conventions of interiority and narrative through the peculiar way he frames the novel’s main plot. The book opens with Fish Lamb running towards the river, and closes with his death by drowning – yet in those few moments, this brief opening between life and death, the entire 20-year narrative of what led to this moment, of the history of the Lambs and the Pickles and the house at Cloudstreet, manages to slip through. Even the line between absence and presence is blurred in the opening scene: ‘Because, look, even the missing are there, the gone and taken are with them in the shade pools of the peppermints by the beautiful, the beautiful the river. And even now, one of the here is leaving’ (2). Fish also floats in and out of the narrative, for while much of the story is told by an omniscient narrator, at random moments in the book Fish takes over as the storyteller before ceding this position, once more, to the main narrator. Winton again draws on religious symbolism to complicate the boundaries between interior and exterior, since both the madman (Fish) and the prophet (the Cloudstreet pig) speak with the voice of the divine, their words originating from a source outside of them rather than being their own speech. Richard Flanagan’s debut novel Death of a River Guide (1994) employs a similar narrative structure to Cloudstreet. Both stories are rooted in a paradox that Stendhal highlights in a famous scene from The Red and the Black (1830), in which Count Altamira observes that ‘the verb to guillotine cannot be conjugated in all tenses; I will be guillotined, you will be guillotined, but one can never say: I have been guillotined’ (507). Stendhal is making a point about the logical limits of storytelling, about how death ought to make it impossible to continue a narrative in which the 228

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narrator’s own demise is implicated. Although Winton is able to achieve this apparent contradiction in Cloudstreet by making the narrative voice float ambiguously in and out of Fish’s perspective, in Death of a River Guide the entire story is told from the improbable first-person perspective of the main character, Aljaz Cosini, whose impending death in a boating accident adds another example to Altamira’s nonsensical list of conjugations: I have drowned. Flanagan flaunts this apparent impossibility from the novel’s opening pages, in which he has Cosini describe in detail the circumstances of his birth. ‘How do I know such things?’ wonders Cosini since, like death, the memory of one’s birth is another impossible limit to human knowledge, an outside that can only be simulated by the fiction’s ability to imagine what lies beyond the interiority of our actual lived experience (4). Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999) is another important Australian novel that plays with notions of inside and outside, with the book’s protagonist, Harley Scat, struggling to establish his identity as an Indigenous man. Harley is forced, as part of this process, to confront the cruel actions of his grandfather, Ernest Soloman Scat, an avowed racist who made it his life’s project to eliminate all traces of the Indigenous heritage in his family line. Harley relates a different counternarrative to his grandfather, who has been incapacitated by a stroke, constructing a new version of his life with the help of an array of certificates, newspaper reports, photographs, letters, and other documents. And it was there, in a dry and hostile environment, in that litter of paper, cards, files and photographs that I began to settle and make myself substantial. A sterile landscape, but I have grown from that fraction of life which fell. I understood that much effort had gone into arriving at me. At someone like me. I was intended as the product of a long and considered process which my grandfather had brought to a conclusion … I had not wanted to write a book. It was Grandfather’s idea … Really, I wanted to prove myself his failure. (28–29) Harley revolts against the definition that this external mass of documents places on him, with its insistence that his grandfather’s vision, backed by the power of the state, is what defines him. This externally imposed interiority is imagined by Harley as making him as insubstantial as a ghost – so light, in fact, that in a moment of magical realism he finds himself ‘pressed hard against the ceiling’ (11). Harley is only able to regain his substantiality by reconnecting with the weight of his true history, a new interior narrative that contradicts the racist and alienating mythology constructed by his grandfather. Although it repeats many of the familiar modern tropes of the externality of subjectivity, the feature that distinguishes Scott’s novel from the other works analysed so far lies in its explicitly political exploration of identity. The visions of Johann Ulrich Voss, Fish Lamb, and Aljaz Cosini, by contrast, while certainly not disconnected from the realm of the political, nonetheless have a predominantly religious, almost mystical quality to them, so that these characters suffer the forced expulsion from themselves as a kind of ecstasy. Harley, however, experiences the state-imposed exile from his own interiority as a burden that, paradoxically, makes him feel weightless. Scott writes: Floating through the house towards the room with its window and mirror, I revised my work so far. How heavy I was with words, with notes quotations journals yearbooks newspaper cuttings archives scribbles. The squeezings from my grandfather’s hand. How burdened I felt with all this, and yet I drifted and floated. (159) As such, a further complication arises: not only does modern Australian fiction deal with the blurred lines of inside and outside, it also experiences two very different kinds of exteriority, the 229

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first as religious ecstasy, the other as cruelty and alienation. This second kind has been particularly important to works of Australian literature dealing with the legacy of colonialism. It is often naively assumed that to be welcomed into the interior is an inherently positive gesture, but this view must be modified in the political context of the modern State. In The Archeology of Violence (1980), the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who spent many years studying the native tribes of South America, argues that the State is an intolerant entity that often deploys a discourse of apparent humanity and inclusion in order to conceal its more nefarious purposes. The tribal structures that characterise premodern societies are a particular target of the State, argues Clastres in his essay ‘Of Ethnocide,’ which abides no competition when it comes to monopolising the allegiance of its inhabitants. The widespread genocidal practices that mark the colonial period are thus primarily ethnocidal, a radical expulsion by the State in order to eliminate the competition of tribal loyalty. The negative consequences of murdering entire populations have over time been displaced, observes Clastres, by a destructive new series of strategies that target the ‘soul’ instead of the body. Who attacks people’s souls? First in rank are the missionaries … [who] strove to substitute the pagans’ barbarous beliefs with the religion of the western world … To crush the strength of pagan belief is to destroy the very substance of the society. The sought-after result is to lead the indigenous peoples, by way of true faith, from savagery to civilisation. Ethnocide is practiced for the good of the Savage … The spirituality of ethnocide is the ethics of humanism … The Indianness of the Indian is suppressed in order to make him a Brazilian citizen. From its agents’ perspective, consequently, ethnocide would not be an undertaking of destruction: it is, on the contrary, a necessary task, demanded by the humanism inscribed at the heart of western culture. (45–46) While Clastres is writing about the historical development of the colonial State in South America, the basic strategies he describes apply equally well to the history of the Australian colonial State. The trend in recent decades of being inclusive of Indigenous peoples and cultures may be an ambivalent phenomenon, for in Clastres’s view such an embrace is predicated on the political triumph of the State: the latter’s newfound ‘generosity’ is merely a confirmation that its ethnocidal ambitions have succeeded to the point where tribal culture is no longer perceived as a genuine competitor. The paradoxes of this approach have been particularly visible in the problematic way that Australian fiction has tended to portray Indigenous characters. Winton’s Cloudstreet, for instance, is one novel that has come under particular scrutiny in this respect. Although Winton’s novel can be considered groundbreaking for its time in acknowledging the dispossession and mistreatment of Indigenous people, its depiction of Indigenous characters, from the ghost of the young Aboriginal woman that haunts the Cloudstreet house to the mysterious ‘blackfella’ who imparts wisdom at key points in the narrative, problematically relegates them to a liminal position that is neither inside nor outside. Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman diagnose the novel’s ‘historical predicament’ in After the Celebration (2009): But if we remember that Cloudstreet is a pre-Mabo novel, its historical predicament returns to haunt. The novel’s Gothic sensibility puts it in touch with an earlier moment that saw Aboriginal people dispossessed from their land and brought under the supervision of people like the rich widow who had first owned the house. But this remains a subdued theme that is never pursued. Aboriginal histories are removed from the novel; the only Aboriginal figures who manage to appear are cast as non-real, spectral, ethereal. (30) Winton’s metaphor of haunting is part of a larger mood of postcolonial ambivalence, one that Laurie Duggan traces in his book Ghost Nation (2001), for instance. The ongoing uncertainty of 230

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inside and outside, of what constitutes self and Other for the Australian nation, is a frequent feature of postcolonial fiction. In her essay ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’ (2017), the Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko, author of such award-winning novels as Mullumbimby (2013) and Too Much Lip (2018), takes issue with Winton and others for their unsatisfactory portrayals of Indigenous culture. Lucashenko argues, with some force, that the repeated depiction of Indigenous cultures as dead and gone, even in works that are otherwise critical of colonisation and dispossession, effectively continues the same narrative of a ‘Dying Race’ that was used by governments and missionaries to oppress Indigenous peoples. The author is not dead. More specifically, the Aboriginal author is not dead, a double happiness! This needs saying over and over. It bears repetition because the long, lingering reach of the Dying Race trope is not dead either … Aboriginal people and indeed entire Aboriginal nations have been having the Last Rites pronounced upon us since almost the earliest days of white invasion. In the colonial project, to the British mind, we were not just lower beings, but also aberrations, and the only things to do with aberrations are to destroy them, imprison them, or assimilate them to your own reality. (1; original emphasis) The prevalence of the ghost as a motif of (post)colonial haunting in Australian fiction fits this critique perfectly, for even though ghosts continue to appear in the context of the present, they do so in such texts as an aberration, a repressed glitch in the national narrative that nonetheless has returned in spectral form. Indigenous culture is thus still rendered as Other, gone, disappeared, only allowed to linger on the edge of Australian consciousness through a film of questionable nostalgia. Lucashenko also draws the reader’s attention to the political issue of refugees seeking asylum in Australia, both in the title of her essay – borrowed from Bob Dylan – and in its epigraph: ‘Dedicated to all refugees currently imprisoned by the Australian State’ (1; original emphasis). Lucashenko is referring here to Australia’s tough border laws, enacted in 2012, which decreed that asylum seekers arriving illegally by boat could be held indefinitely in detention camps on nearby territories such as Nauru and Manus Island. Lucashenko joins a chorus of other literary voices standing against this inhuman policy. Winton wrote a newspaper editorial in 2015, symbolically timed for publication on Palm Sunday, in which he called for an end to detention (the piece is reproduced, in modified form, in The Boy Behind the Curtain [2016]). Felicity Castagna’s novel No More Boats (2017) traces the history of the policy to the 2001 Tampa crisis, in which a Norwegian ship carrying refugees was refused entry into Australia, an event that had a profound influence on that year’s federal election and beyond. Michelle de Kretser mentions the asylum seeker policy in her novel The Life to Come (2017), and chastised Australia’s politicians over the issue when accepting the 2018 Miles Franklin Award for that book. In 2018, the Iranian-Kurdish writer Behrouz Boochani published No Friend but the Mountains: Writings from Manus Prison, a mixture of memoir and poetry, that won both acclaim and, in January 2019, two of Australia’s richest literary awards. The issues of refugees and Indigenous culture overlap in the way they share common fears and concerns about Australian identity, which has a long history of regarding both groups as an Other to be expelled or marginalised. Indeed, the translator of Boochani’s book, Omid Tofighian, plays on this theme of inside and outside, self and Other, by setting up a contrast between the two islands of Australia and Manus. In the ‘Translator’s Reflections’ that appear after the main text, he provides the following allegory: There is an island isolated in a silent ocean where people are held prisoner. The people cannot experience the world beyond the island. They cannot see the immediate society outside the prison and they certainly 231

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do not learn about what takes place in other parts of the world. They only see each other and hear the stories they tell one another. This is their reality; they are frustrated by their isolation and incarceration, but they have also been taught to accept their predicament. News somehow enters the prison about another island where the mind is free to know and create. The prisoners are given a sense of what life is like on the other island but they do not have the capacity or experience to understand fully. (359; original italics) The reader initially encounters this passage expecting it to refer to the refugees on Manus Island, whose world is bounded by their imprisonment, but in a brilliant reversal Tofighian reveals that the island he is talking about is not Manus, but Australia. The two islands exist in a dialectical relationship, each functioning as the Other that defines the island’s sense of its own self. While focusing attention on the plight of asylum seekers, Boochani, Tofighian, and other members of their intellectual circle also see their work as part of a larger project for creating a new political philosophy that challenges this oppositional form of subjectivity. The hypocrisy of Australia’s repeated practice of excluding the Other is deepened by the fact that the colony from which the modern State was born was itself built on the exclusion of people who were considered marginal to British society. This point is central to recent novels such as Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005), which follows the story of William Thornhill, a poor Englishman who is transported to New South Wales with his family to Australia for the trivial crime of stealing some wood, and Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America (2009), which alternates between Olivier Garmont, a Frenchman who bears a striking similarity to Alexis de Tocqueville, and his British/Australian footman, John Larrit, nicknamed the ‘Parrot.’ ‘Democracies and monarchies, it does not matter – the world is filled with poor men tortured by the state,’ reflects Parrot in the midst of his travels. ‘Australia was invented by the British, that whole dry carcass, its withered dugs offered to our criminal lips’ (Carey 225). Parrot reveals that he has a past, a wife and child that he abandoned in Sydney because he failed to recognise that Australia, not Britain, was now his home: I had a wife, a child, a home, but for all that I did not understand it was my home. She, my wife, would not call it home either. All around us everyone was the same – soldiers, convicts, even captains with their holds stock-full of rum. Home did not mean here. That was elsewhere. When will we be in our real home at last, we asked each other … We were at home, while waiting to go home, while missing home. (225; original emphasis) The absurdity of this longing for a return to ‘home’ in England, as both Grenville’s and Carey’s novels demonstrate, is that this nostalgic feeling is not reciprocated by the English society to which they imagine themselves to belong. Like Tofighian’s two islands, Carey in particular explores the deceptions and exclusions that go into creating the so-called ‘New World’ by using the United States as a reflective mirror for understanding Australia. While conventional wisdom assumes that it is good to be included and bad to be excluded, the complexity of human experience shows that exclusion is a crucial part of evaluating whether the process of inclusion is worth undertaking. Grenville’s feminist masterpiece Joan Makes History (1988), for instance, is a pointed historical counter-narrative to the male-dominated patriotism that marked Australia’s bicentenary in the year of its publication. In order to highlight the repeated exclusion of women from that history, Grenville uses the name ‘Joan’ to designate a female ‘everywoman,’ with the novel alternating between a contemporary Joan, Joan Redman (modified from Radulescu), and a series of overlooked historical ‘Joans’ that were present at key events from Australia’s past, including Captain Cook’s wife, a convict on the First Fleet, an Indigenous woman, a Joan who witnessed the Eureka Stockade, and another who attended the Federation ceremony in 1901. What marks Joan Redman as different is her profound ambition to ‘make history,’ to be a 232

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famous figure whose name will appear prominently in the public record. In order to achieve this aim, about halfway through the novel she leaves her husband Duncan and sets out on her own path. ‘But I must make history, I had to remind myself,’ writes Grenville. ‘Then I would be freed from the heavy weight of destiny that lay upon me’ (181; original emphasis). After some reflection, Joan decides that the most efficient way to achieve this goal is to become a man. Accordingly, she changes her clothes, gets a haircut, modifies her style of speech and body language, and adopts the name Jack: ‘It was done, I was Jack, a woman of destiny’ (184). This excursion outside her usual identity is a revelation for Joan. Her new identity as a man gives her a new sense of power and destiny at first, but also the realisation that men also have to play a game of power if they are to be remembered. Joan comes to the gradual understanding that her desire to make history, to become a public figure – the Prime Minister, for example – is far less important to her than what she really desires, which is to be loved for who she is. This final turn of Joan Makes History is a powerful rejection of the seductive illusion that the adulation of the Other is a recipe for happiness and satisfaction. Joan can only learn this important lesson, however, by stepping outside her own self, an expulsion that gives her a crucial new perspective both on her own inner desires and on the unexpected wisdom of the many other Joans that have preceded her on this path. Lucashenko offers a similar solution in her essay, an affirmation of the fact that ‘Australians have to learn to listen’ (9). To listen means to allow what is outside to enter into the interior of our beings, to allow the Other to permeate who we are, not so that we can be colonised, but in order to see ourselves more clearly through the eyes of that Other – is such radical empathy not the very heart and soul of the task of ethics? I do, however, disagree with Lucashenko’s insistence in her opening paragraph that ‘the Author is emphatically Not Dead,’ a refutation of Roland Barthes’s landmark essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968). While I admire the way Lucashenko weaves this rebuttal into her larger argument against the Dying Race trope and the tendency to portray Indigenous culture in the past tense, I also think it is important to acknowledge that this is a misreading of Barthes that has important consequences for her subsequent arguments. Lucashenko draws on a common misinterpretation of ‘The Death of the Author’ which holds, simplistically, that Barthes is arguing that the author no longer matters, so the focus of modern criticism must now fall on the reader, whose reception of the text represents a unique interpretive performance of its possible meaning. What Barthes is actually arguing is that the elevation of the Author as the singular source of a text is a historical aberration, one that was made possible by the convergence of ‘English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation,’ which together ‘discovered the prestige of the individual’ (142–143). While this notion of the Author was challenged by modernist authors like Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust, and Bertolt Brecht, Barthes points out that before this modern idea of the Author ‘the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator’ (142) – that is to say, the wisdom of the ancients, which the modernists cited by Barthes have merely rediscovered, is that stories and narratives are something external that speak through us rather than originating in some kind of authorial interiority. Is it not in this very sense that we can say, with Lucashenko, that the Indigenous songlines buzz and hum in the rhythms of Australian literature? Lucashenko writes: We reference the old literature … Ours is still a culture through which the impact of the songlines runs, just as reinforcing steel runs through concrete. Just as Shakespeare and Milton and the King James Bible run through modern English literature … So the songlines, or the Tjukkurpa or the Dreaming, form the Upanishads, the Torah, Testaments New and Old for this place … And the songlines are in the land, where they can never be lost. (1–2) The wisdom of the ancients and the moderns surely converges in this insight: it is the songlines, the stories that run through us that, like language, come from the outside, from the Other, and yet 233

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make up the most intimate parts of our interior lives. Rimbaud’s dictum ‘ je est un autre’ can thus be read in two equally valid ways: negatively, as a symptom of modern alienation, but also positively, as a reminder of the interconnectedness, the ethical entanglement – even, possibly, the love – that I bear for an Other whose stories have invaded my being, captivating me in the best possible sense.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author.’ Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. 142–147. Boochani, Behrouz. No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Trans. Omid Tofighian. Sydney, NSW: Picador, 2018. Carey, Peter. Parrot and Olivier in America. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2010. Castagna, Felicity. No More Boats. Europa Editions, 2019. Clastres, Pierre. Archeology of Violence. Trans. Jeanine Herman. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 1994. Duggan, Laurie. Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901–1939. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001. Flanagan, Richard. Death of a River Guide. New York: Grove, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York: Horace Liveright, 1920. Gelder, Ken, and Paul Salzman. After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2009. Grenville, Kate. Joan Makes History. New York: British American, 1988. ———. The Secret River. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. De Kretser, Michelle. The Life to Come. New York: Catapult, 2019. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2017. Lucashenko, Melissa. Mullumbimby. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2015. ———. ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant.’ JASAL 17.1 (2017): 1–10. . ———. Too Much Lip. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2018. Malouf, David. Remembering Babylon. London: Vintage, 1994. McCourt, Suzanne. The Lost Child. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2015. Scott, Kim. Benang: From the Heart. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Press, 1999. Stendhal. The Red and the Black. Trans. Roger Gard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002. White, Patrick. Voss. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin, 2009. Winton, Tim. Cloudstreet. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 1992. ———. In the Winter Dark. London: Picador, 2009. ———. The Boy Behind the Curtain. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin, 2016. ———. ‘Tim Winton’s Palm Sunday Plea: Start the Soul-Searching Australia.’ Sydney Morning Herald 30 Mar. 2019. .

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24 GENDERING AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE Alison Bartlett

An awareness that Australian literature is actually gendered emerged with the critiques generated by the women’s liberation movement from the late 1960s onwards. Of course, there had been a strong, if sometimes neglected, tradition of women writers since the late 1800s (most notably Louisa Lawson) who addressed gender as an issue for writers and publication, to which I shall return. As a recognisable critical movement, however, it is second-wave feminist theory and criticism that established a body of work and social analysis regarding gender and literature in Australia. This chapter will focus on the development of those arguments and their implications. The initial direction of gender criticism was to note the structural marginalisation of women – and Indigenous and migrant characters as well as sexuality – from the dominant expressions of what is Australian in literature. The naturalised features of the Australian character type were typified by a sardonic white male who preferred to imagine his place in the bush rather than the city. In 1958 Russel Ward identified this as the Australian legend, anchored in the 1890s writing culture of the Bulletin’s famous Red Pages under the editorship of J.F. Archibald and then A.G. Stephens. Legacies of Australian identity like these meant that the work of literary scholars and historians often overlapped, later joined by art historians and cultural studies scholars. Historian Anne Summers’s examination of the place of women in Australia’s white settlement in Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975), Beverley Kingston’s My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann (1975) on women and work, and Miriam Dixson’s The Real Matilda (1976) on cultural myths of gender in Australia, were groundbreaking works that examined not only women’s role in the formation of the nation but also ways in which historical and literary narratives shape gendered and raced subjects. As Susan Sheridan noted in 1993, the ‘more exciting’ work at this time was emerging from feminist historians in Australia, who were able to ask more challenging questions of their discipline (106). Sheridan, Carole Ferrier, and Delys Bird, note the disciplinary constraints of working with the traditions of English studies generally and Australian literary criticism in particular, and also the attraction of cultural studies as a more vital and contemporary discipline concerned with everyday cultural formations. Commensurate literary analysis emerged initially in magazines and journals before being published in books like Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home (1981), a biography of a generation of 1930s Australian women writers; Sylvia Lawson’s The Archibald Paradox (1984) arguing for a new form of life writing as well as contesting the Bulletin’s grasp; and Kay Schaffer’s landmark study Women and the Bush (1988). Schaffer’s was one of the first studies to apply psychoanalytic theory to argue that ‘the bush’ is a fantasy landscape whose feminisation and romanticisation in history, fiction, and film is structured through forces of desire.

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The term ‘gender’ quickly became shorthand for ‘women’ as it was evident that masculinity was the assumed default position of much literature of Australia. The apparent resilience and unremarked nature of typical Australian tropes of masculinity prompted a second directive: the search for and revaluing of women’s contributions to Australian literature. Nineteenth-century writers like Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, Catherine Helen Spence, and Rosa Praed were revived to contest the domination of the Bulletin writers, and early twentieth-century writers including Christina Stead, Miles Franklin, Catherine Martin, Henry Handel Richardson, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Eleanor Dark, Eve Langley, Kylie Tennant, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, and Dymphna Cusack slowly began to be republished and hence available for curriculum. The strategy to publish under a masculine or unidentifiable nom de plume was indicative of the historical structural barriers for women. As Modjeska notes, few people had read such authors in the 1970s – and nor were they interested in doing so – but these writers ‘were tackling questions about how to live and work in this country as women and as writers, and how to build a culture that has its roots in Australian histories and conditions, rather than in a foreign past’ (ix). This formative generation from the early- to mid-twentieth century was thus clustered into a critical mass – in part due to scholarship that brought them together – whose legacy made for a new set of conditions and writers. Modjeska notes that the last of these women died during the 1980s, when there was a burgeoning new cohort of Australian women writers being published. The establishment of new publishers dedicated to women’s writing was critical to retrieving women’s work and making it available to readers, as well as creating a contemporary generation of writers. Many presses were started by women writers, or collectives working with subscription members, to create opportunities for publication in what was perceived as a hostile industry. Such presses include Everywoman Press (Sydney 1975), McPhee Gribble (Melbourne 1975), Sybylla (Melbourne 1976), Sisters (Melbourne 1979), No Regrets (Sydney 1979), Redress (Sydney 1983), Tantrum (Adelaide 1986), Sea Cruise (Sydney), Spinifex Press (Melbourne 1990), and Artemis (1992). The launch of little magazines and newspapers created a place for a new generation of women writers: Vashti’s Voice (Melbourne 1971), MeJane (Sydney 1971), Refractory Girl (1972), Hecate (Brisbane 1975), Mabel (Sydney 1974), Scarlet Woman (Syd/Melb1975), and Girls’ Own (Sydney 1980) were all feminist magazines that offered a place for the publication of women’s creative writing as well as social analysis that impacted on literary production. The decidedly feminist motive of the poetry anthology Mother, I’m Rooted edited by Kate Jennings in 1975 brought together known and – mostly – unknown women poets in an effort to counter the rejection of women’s writing by publishers and also to publish women’s poetic experience. In 1989 Australian Women’s Book Review was established exclusively to review publications by women as another mechanism to circulate women’s writing. The creation of university courses on ‘Images of Women’ and ‘Women in Literature’ as well as interdisciplinary Women’s Studies courses from 1972 onwards, starting at the University of Queensland and Flinders University, generated another readership for these texts. It is almost impossible to imagine now that a literature degree could be taught without reference to any women writers, but this was a common experience before gender became recognised as a facet not only of personal and national identity but also of the conditions of production, publication, circulation, and reception of writing as part of literary institutions. The study of women’s writing in universities initiated two key scholarly journals for publishing critical feminist work: Hecate founded by literary scholar Carole Ferrier in Brisbane in 1975 described itself as a women’s interdisciplinary journal (and later an interdisciplinary journal of women’s liberation) and publishes some of the key currents in feminist literary criticism alongside creative work; and Australian Feminist Studies established by literary critic Susan Sheridan and historian Susan Magarey in Adelaide in 1985 emerges directly from Women’s Studies interdisciplinary scholarship. 236

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In addition to these journals, anthologies of feminist literary criticism slowly began to appear in the 1980s. Shirley Walker’s edited collection Who Is She? Images of Woman in Australian Fiction (1983) mirrors the gynocritical approach to teaching gender, although few of its chapters considered themselves feminist, and Gender, Politics and Fiction edited by Ferrier (1985) brought together ‘feminist and socialist perspectives’ on twentieth-century Australian women’s novels, with a new edition in 1992 adding essays on Aboriginal women’s writing, erotic and lesbian writing, and genre erosion. It is telling that this text included a bibliography of creative and critical writing in the field, which can be contained in 15 pages, complemented by Debra Adelaide’s 1988 bibliographic guide to Australian women writers at a time when they could still be compiled. Pam Gilbert’s Coming Out from Under (1988) is an early example of a critical survey of ten contemporary Australian women writers, quickly followed by Gillian Whitlock’s Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers (1989), where she defines the 1980s as the time when ‘women writers and readers … entered the mainstream’ (xi). The marginalisation of non-Anglo women was recognised relatively early. Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin’s edited collection, Beyond the Echo: Multicultural Women’s Writing (1988), developed into Gunew’s landmark scholarship in Framing Marginality (1993), theorising the way even second- and third-generation ‘migrant writing’ was used as a term ‘to describe the writing of all those Australians perceived as not belonging to the literary and cultural traditions deriving from England and Ireland’ (xi). Asian-Australian writing emerged as a critical category in the 1990s, coinciding with Prime Minister Paul Keating’s forging of Asian-Pacific relations and also with Alison Broinowski’s critical work in The Yellow Lady (1992), and is represented by writers like Beth Yahp, Merlinda Bobis, Yasmine Gooneratne, and Simone Lazaroo, many of whom publish critical commentary on the topic alongside scholars Ien Ang and Tseen Khoo. While Indigenous women poets like Oodgeroo Noonuccal (who changed her name from Kath Walker in 1988) and Bobbie Sykes had earned a relatively high profile, it was the phenomenal success of Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) that popularised the genre of Indigenous women’s life writing, albeit in a way that was not too confronting for white readers. My Place charts a story of passing as white and discovering an Aboriginal family heritage. While earlier work (like Monica Clare’s Karobran in 1978) went relatively unnoticed, the genre was avidly embraced after My Place, with Glenys Ward’s Wandering Girl (1988), Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988), Jackie Huggins’s Auntie Rita (1994), MumShirl with Bobbi Sykes (1992), Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (1996), and Doris Kartinyeri’s Kick the Tin (2000) to mention a few. While Indigenous Australian writing and theatre was considered a serious literary field by this time, the largely autobiographical publications of Indigenous women were often diminished by critics as ‘merely’ life memories. Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that the term ‘life writing’ emerged to account for the difference in Indigenous women’s texts which ‘do not fit the usual strict chronological narrative of autobiography, and they are the product of collaborative lives’ (1), rather than of individuals. Their ‘collective memories of inter-generational relationships’ and, importantly, ‘subjectivities and experiences of colonial processes’ are political acts of selfrepresentation (Moreton-Robinson 1). A later generation of Indigenous women including Lisa Bellear, Melissa Lucashenko, Anita Heiss, Lahrissa Behrendt, Alexis Wright, and Ali Cobby Eckermann have been producing literary, popular, historical fiction, chick lit, non-fiction, biography, social commentary and poetry between them, all but shifting the generic association of Indigenous women with life writing. An important cohort of Indigenous women academics has also made a massive impact on literary scholarship. Huggins’s early work in Queensland was collected into Sister Girl (1998), but it was Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman (2000) that provoked scholarly response to her densely theorised history of dispossession in Australia and feminism’s complicity. Moreton-Robinson assisted with the development and became patron of the Australian Critical 237

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Race and Whiteness Studies Association that spearheaded the theorising of whiteness in Australian cultural and literary studies. Morgan, Moreton-Robinson, Behrendt, Heiss, and Tracey Bunda are part of a cohort of Indigenous women in universities whose intellectual contribution to feminist literary scholarship is now invaluable to institutions such as literary studies. Life writing was a critical arena in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s writing gained traction. In her preface to the 1992 republication of Gender, Politics and Fiction, Ferrier notes that the book was responding not only to the politics of the canon and the elitism of Literature, but also to ‘the developing practice of the writing of biography, autobiography and life history which was beginning to “knock on the door of literature”’ (xi). Collections of women’s correspondence from earlier times thus became important in demonstrating not only a tradition of Australian women writing but also the conditions under which they wrote and published. Jill Roe’s edited volumes of select letters by Miles Franklin to friends, My Congenials (1993), and Carole Ferrier’s collection of letters between six novelists, As Good as a Yarn with You (1992), are indicative of a genre established by Lucy Frost’s collection of rural women’s epistolaries in No Place for a Nervous Lady (1984) and Elizabeth Webby’s primary sources in Colonial Voices (1989) about nineteenth-century Australia. Katie Holmes’s work on Australian women’s diaries of the 1920s and 1930s, Spaces in her Day (1995), also added to the revaluation of the private sphere of writing associated with women and tracks a particular genre in which women could find expression. A similar urge to document contemporary women writers was registered through collections of interviews like Giulia Giuffre’s A Writing Life (1990), Jenny Digby’s A Woman’s Voice (1996) with its attention to poets, as well as Candida Baker’s Yacker series that incorporated many women writers, and Jocelyn Scutt’s many collections of interviews with women that included writers. The politics of life writing can be understood as part of a broader contestation of the aesthetics and conventions of genre contested by politicising gender. Most pronounced was the claiming of detective fiction, particularly for hardboiled lesbian detectives, leading to a collection of academic essays, Killing Women: Rewriting Detective Fiction, edited by Delys Bird (1993). Critique of the association of women with romance novels emerged in Goodbye to Romance (1989), edited by Elizabeth Webby and Lydia Wevers. Australian ‘grunge fiction’ or dirty realism emerged in the 1990s capturing the mundane, vomit-filled ennui of sex, drugs, and music in suburban cities, when key novels emerged almost simultaneously in 1995 by Andrew McGahan, Justine Ettler, and Linda Jaivin. The writing of sexuality in ways that appealed to and centred on women’s desire alongside the fantasy of constructing a language of women’s sexuality became a popular item to discuss at writers’ festivals. A whole new genre of women’s erotica emerged, which was pushed to its limits by Mary Fallon’s novel Working Hot (1989) about dykes in Sydney, described by Fiona McGregor in 2019 as ‘written with an experimental verve that still dazzles today.’ Experimental writing emerged in response to many of the debates about traditional form and language, most significantly in Telling Ways (1988), edited by Anna Couani and Sneja Gunew, and also through a mixed form that became known as fictocriticism: a methodology that combines creative and critical work. While this has been particularly useful for writers like Stephen Muecke and Ross Gibson thinking through relations to land, its roots in a feminist critique of form and the artificial separation of the creative/critical can be found in Helen Flavell’s work, and examples anthologised by Amanda Nettelbeck and Heather Kerr in The Space Between: Australian Women Write Fictocriticism (1998) and Mudmaps: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing (2014), edited by Moya Costello, Barbara Brooks, Anna Gibbs, and Rosslyn Prosser. The contesting of generic conventions might be partially attributed to the relatively early Australian literary interest in what became known as French feminist theory. Hecate journal published Meaghan Morris’s early commentary on French feminism in 1979 specifically critiquing the gendering of genre in literary discourse, and an interview with Luce Irigaray in 1993. Refractory Girl magazine published a translation of Irigaray’s essay ‘One Does Not Move Without the 238

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Other’ by Rosi Braidotti in 1982, alongside essays on French feminism by Mia Campioni and Rosi Braidotti, and by Elizabeth Grosz on Kristeva. Despite this early engagement with continental theories of women’s writing, or écriture féminine, Ken Ruthven’s 1986 Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction – generally acknowledged as the first book-length study in the field – ignored this potent field and met with criticism not only for coopting the field but also for neglecting key Australian feminist scholars (see Sheridan). By the mid-1990s Australians became known as key interpreters of French feminist theories, including philosophers Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens. In its application to Australian literature, the politics of écriture féminine was championed in my own literary study, Jamming the Machinery (1998), and contested by Lever, who argued in Real Relations (2000) that such theories over-value avant garde and experimental writing while realism has a much larger readership. This critical work was not isolated in Australia: it responded and contributed to a worldwide production of what became canonical feminist texts and events that offered a language and methods to think through women’s place in institutions like literature. Literary criticism played a key role in producing a critical language, through texts such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) that critiqued canonical male writers’ representation of gender, and the work of other US academics including Elaine Showalter’s call for a women’s canon in A Literature of Their Own (1977). The circulation of feminist ideas brought Americans like Judy Chicago and Mary Daly to Australia in highly publicised public events, while Australian Germaine Greer’s public success with The Female Eunuch (1970) (in which literature is found culpable) made her an international celebrity, and Australian publisher Carmen Callil founded Virago Press in London in 1972. The national and international circuit of conferences and fellowships were critical for circulating ideas and texts and were often reported in journals. As Sheridan reminds us, during the 1970s and 1980s it was at conferences that ideas and disagreements were hot-housed, most notably the Australian ‘Women and Labour’ conferences from the late 1970s to their demise in 1984 over irreconcilable differences (106). In many ways it was the 1988 Bicentenary that forced a reassessment of what it meant to be Australian, and how this was reflected in literary and historical narratives. While the nationalist agenda was expensively celebratory, academics were asking whose history was being promulgated and how the dispossession and massacre of Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants could be accounted for in the nation’s mythologising of ‘discovery’ and settlement by Captain Cook. New histories emerged that paid tribute to First Nation experiences, like Creating a Nation (1994), which attended to Indigenous experience as well as domestic formations by its feminist authors Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly. Such revisionist projects also impacted earlier feminist histories that positioned women as the colonised. The Australian Bicentennial Authority funded Kate Grenville to write a celebratory novel: the resulting Joan Makes History (1988) purposefully upends the meanings of history to refocus on the domestic, representational, trivialised, and vernacular moments of national histories. These examples demonstrate the attention directed not only to the content of national mythologising but also to the form in which such narratives are reproduced, and interventions to render the nation with multiple histories not readily reconcilable. Amid renewed availability of and attention to women’s writing, combined with specialised university curricula and government interventions like the 1975 International Women’s Year and the 1988 Bicentennial Fund in combination with multicultural policies, there emerged in the 1980s a generation of women writers who have since become pivotal to Australian literature: Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Dorothy Porter. This cohort features in key survey publications like The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) and Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman’s survey, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction, 1970–88 (1989). The new diversity attended to race, class, and ethnicity as part of the curricula of Australian literature, with 239

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Rosa Cappiello’s Oh Lucky Country (1984) serving multiple agendas as well as riffing off Donald Horne’s 1964 tome, The Lucky Country. Poets were anthologised in Up from Below: Poems of the 1980s (1987) and Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets edited by Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn in 1986, and in Poetry and Gender (1989) David Brooks and Brenda Walker collected statements and essays on women’s poetry and poetics. Susan Lever’s edition of the Oxford Book of Australian Women’s Verse (1995) had a sense of the field finally making ‘OUP status.’ Anthology projects like these mark not only a growing tendency to canonise but also a new cohort of contemporary writers jostling for inclusion in these ranks. Drama did not receive attention in book form until the 1990s with Around the Edge: Women’s Plays (1992) published by Tantrum Press in Adelaide, followed in succession by Peta Tait and Elizabeth Schafer’s edited collection, Australian Women’s Drama: Texts and Feminisms (1997), Playing with Ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the Suffragettes to the Sixties by Susan Pfisterer and Carolyn Pickett (1999), and Tremendous Worlds: Australian Women’s Drama, 1890–1960, also by Pfisterer (1999). As Australian women’s writing became legitimated in the academy, single-author studies seem to have emerged as a preferred mode of literary criticism in the twenty-first century, contextualising as well as authorising the reputation and status of particular writers. Perhaps foreshadowed by Sheridan’s Christina Stead (1988) and Ferrier’s Jean Devanny (1999), the increased possibilities of scholarship through digital production coinciding with established critical reputation for the 1980s generation have seen a new wave of critical biographical work on Helen Garner (Brennan 2017), Thea Astley (Sheridan and Genoni 2014; Sheridan 2016; Lamb 2016), Elizabeth Jolley (Dibble 2008), Shirley Hazzard (Olubas 2014), and Beverley Farmer ( Jacobs 2001). Sheridan’s Nine Lives (2011) brings together a cohort of postwar women writers in a similar way to Modjeska’s study of the generation before that. There is a sense of generations moving with these studies and, with digital technologies, a much greater number of emerging writers. As feminist theory moved into areas of queer theory and masculinity studies, literary criticism has been slower to mobilise these fields. The representation of masculinity in Australian literature has had sustained book-length attention only by Katherine Bode’s Damaged Men, Desiring Women (2008), although many women students have written theses on masculinity in Australian literature. The reluctance of most male scholars to engage with gender is particularly noticeable despite many of Australia’s most popular writers (Tim Winton, Richard Flanagan, Christos Tsiolkas) being concerned with Australian masculinity. The publication of Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing: An Anthology in 1993 was groundbreaking for establishing a gay writing tradition from Australian colonial times to the present, and for being published by Oxford University Press. Editor Robert Dessaix’s Introduction argues that the loud insistence on binaries of gendered behaviour, sexed bodies, and sexual attraction in Australian literature (aligning masculinity-male-heterosexual) is a measure of the instability of those categories (2). He also credits feminism with a tendency for women writers in the collection exerting a playful freedom of form and language while the male writers exercise restraint, often resorting to what he calls ‘reportage’ (17). An earlier collection, Edge City on Two Different Plans: A Collection of Lesbian and Gay Writings from Australia in 1983, was published by the Sydney Gay Writers Collective, demonstrating the community-driven impetus to ‘counterbalance the heterosexist and masculinity literature’ (Bradstock et al. 15). Small presses are notable for the production of such anthologies: Spinifex’s The Exploding Frangipani: Lesbian Writing from Australia and New Zealand (1990), Wicked Women’s Pink Ink (1991), BlackWattle’s Fruit: A New Anthology of Contemporary Australian Gay Writing (1994). Michael Hurley maintains, however, that it is more likely that fiction and non-fiction had a greater impact in making visible gay identity, community, and literature, than anthologised volumes (2010, 42), as authors like Dessaix, Tsiolkas, Dorothy Porter, and Fiona McGregor moved into the mainstream. Despite the shifting politics of what

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constituted gay literature (the author’s sexuality, the character’s sexuality, the reader’s pleasure, the aesthetics and poetics of representation), Hurley reminds us that it was the AIDS crisis peaking in the early 1990s that prompted this ‘cultural flourishing’ in publishing (50). A special issue of Meanjin titled Australia Queer (1996) that coincided with Anne Marie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction (1996) registered the destabilisation of categories of gender and sexuality largely through their resistance to heteronormativity that have proved useful for literary analysis (see Thompson and Baker). A turning point for feminist literary criticism was the Manifesting Australian Literary Feminisms conference in 2007, and the ensuing publication as a book-length edition of Australian Literary Studies in 2009 edited by the organisers, Margaret Henderson and Ann Vickery. They frame their introduction by characterising literary feminism as in a state of crisis, the affects of which can be felt as ‘melancholy, ennui, boredom, grieving, frustration, and sometimes shame’ (1). This is attributed to feminism’s fundamental commitment to social change and the inordinately slow and difficult register of progress. If this event brought together the dispersed cohort of feminist literary critics briefly into the one place – Melbourne – it was not for long nor was it sustainable in manifesting a dynamic field of scholarship. The proceedings were published around the same time as a British volume, A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (2007), in which Australia is mentioned only in relation to its retrospective failures regarding Indigenous engagement. The combined impact of both texts is to position feminist literary criticism as a kind of museum piece whose demise is defined by its historicity, despite the optimism of manifesting further feminist literary criticisms. As a register of the imperceptible rate of social change there has been renewed attention to counting reviews, shortlists, and prizes in which women writers are present, replaying 1970s arguments about the structural limits of publication. This has been demonstrated most trenchantly by the Stella Prize. Named after Miles Franklin, whose name is associated with Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Stella’s project of counting women’s drastic under-representation in literary award shortlists and prizes in 2011 led to a crowd-funded prize exclusively for women writers which has been awarded annually since 2013. In addition, their counting of Australian publishing practices of reviewing of and by women writers continues to demonstrate the ongoing structural barriers that still fall short of gender parity. Other counting projects informed by digital humanities methods data mining the National Library of Australia’s database, TROVE, have also been challenging the cultural understanding of nineteenth-century Australian literature as the domain of men. Katherine Bode’s quantitative work in Reading by Numbers (2012) presents data and arguments that recalibrate the field of publishing to argue that Australian women were much more successful than men in publishing colonial novels in Britain, while male writers found it easier to be published locally. Scholars have focused too easily on ‘serious’ literature rather than including domestic and romance fiction, Bode argues in her revisionist history of the Australian novel, and this has skewed historical memory. Her work reminds us of the early critical moves to retrieve a women’s tradition of writing that dislodged given understandings of Australian literature as a field of production. The construction of gender in Australian literature, then, might be summarised as a political intervention initiated by second-wave feminism that sought to change social structures through examining narrative, form, genre, and language as traditions that construct and limit the intersections of gender, race, and nation. The shift in publishing women/migrant/Indigenous/gay writers in experimental and traditional forms can be seen as a direct result, although current counting projects are testament to the ways in which authority and value continue to privilege masculinity. While critical work on gender and literature appears to have been waning for some time, it continues more robustly in fields like queer theory and cultural studies.

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Works Cited Bird, Delys. ‘Around 1985: Australian Feminist Literary Criticism and Its “Foreign Bodies.”’ JASAL spec. iss. (1998): 202–209. . Bradstock, Margaret, et al., ed. Edge City on Two Different Plans: A Collection of Lesbian and Gay Writings from Australia. Leichhardt, NSW: Sydney Gay Writers Collective, 1983. Brennan, Bernadette. A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work, Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2017. Dessaix, Robert. ‘Introduction.’ Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Dessaix. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1993. Ferrier, Carole. ‘Preface to the 1992 Edition.’ Gender Politics and Fiction: Twentieth-Century Australian Women’s Novels. Ed. Carole Ferrier. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1992. xi–xvi. Gunew, Sneja. Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 1993. Henderson, Margaret, and Ann Vickery. ‘Manifesting Australian Feminisms: Nexus and Faultlines.’ Australian Literary Studies 24.3–4 (2009): 1–19. Hurley, Michael. ‘Gay and Lesbian Writing and Publishing in Australia, 1961–2001.’ Australian Literary Studies 25.1 (2010): 42–70. Jacobs, Lyn. Against the Grain: Beverley Farmer’s Writing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001. McGregor, Fiona. ‘The Hot Desk: Working Hot, by Mary Fallon.’ Sydney Review of Books 25 Feb. 2019. . Modjeska, Drusilla. ‘Introduction to the 1991 Reprint.’ Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers, 1925–1945. North Ryde, NSW: Imprint/Angus and Robertson, 1991. ix–xii. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2000. Olubas, Brigitta. Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist. New York: Cambria, 2012. Ommundsen, Wenche. ‘“This Story Does Not Begin on a Boat”: What is Australian about Asian Australian Writing?’ Continuum 25.4 (2011): 503–513. Sheridan, Susan. ‘Australian Feminist Literary History: Around 1981.’ Hecate 19.1 (1993): 101–115. Thompson, Jay Daniel, and Dallas J Baker. ‘Introduction: Queer Writing – Setting the Scene.’ TEXT 31 (2015): 1–11. . Whitlock, Gillian. Eight Voices of the Eighties. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1989.

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25 ‘SILENCE IS MY HABITAT’ Judith Wright, Writing, and Deafness Jessica White

‘I don’t remember any interviews in which [my deafness has] been regarded as something that people … wanted to know more about,’ Judith Wright observed in conversation with Heather Rusden in 1990 (‘On Being Deaf’ 27). Thirty years later, little has shifted in this regard in literary scholarship on one of Australia’s most famous poets, even though the loss of her hearing affected her for 63 of her 85 years and, as Wright acknowledged in the same interview, deafness has ‘really reached into all the interstices of my life, it’s been part of the conditions I live under’ (21). Notably, it also reached into Wright’s writing, guiding her towards her vocation and shaping her style and themes. Silence, for example, is prevalent in her oeuvre, as is her awareness of the limits of language. As someone who needed to strain constantly to hear, Wright also knew that meaning could easily break (one would need only to hide one’s lips), and that there were always conversations happening, whether between humans or other-than-humans, beyond her hearing which she could not access. In addition, having lost one sense, Wright’s perception of the world through her other senses was heightened, as becomes evident through the sensory detail in her poetry. She was also an inveterate writer of letters, as this was an easier mode of communication for her than listening on the telephone. However, out of some 540 items of criticism about Wright’s writing listed in Austlit, the Australian Literature database, only three relate to her deafness. Given the nearly lifelong impact of Wright’s disability, it is remiss that scholarship has failed to contemplate how it impacted on her work. This chapter aims to redress this silence, concluding with a plea to readers to attend to Wright’s distinction to listen to, rather than ‘just hear’ (13), the words of deaf writers.1

Three-Quarters of a Lifetime Wright began to lose her hearing at age 22 (Wright, Half a Lifetime 152). Three years later she was diagnosed with otosclerosis (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf ’ 1), a condition in which abnormal bony growth on the stapes, the third of the tiny bones behind the ear drum, prevents the three bones from vibrating against one another. This means that sound waves cannot be passed from the ear drum to the cochlea, which in turn sends messages to the brain to be converted into sound. The condition can be operated upon in a procedure through which the stapes are removed and replaced with a prosthesis. However, if the bony overgrowth has already spread to the inner ear and cochlear, it will cause permanent hearing loss. This correlates with Wright’s experience, as by the time the operation for otosclerosis was developed, she ‘already had progressed so far that it wasn’t just otosclerosis, it was nerve deafness as well’ (3). Wright decided against the operation as there was a 50% success rate and, she states, ‘I was pretty busy and I couldn’t really feel … that I could take six weeks off on a 50/50 243

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chance, so I waited to see if they would improve their operation, but they didn’t’ (3). The condition is hereditary, though Wright questioned this because no one in her family had been deaf for three generations (39). However, otosclerosis is known to skip generations. Wright’s assessment of the impact of her diagnosis varies. In a 1987 interview, she describes herself as ‘insecure as a result’ of becoming deaf (qtd in Rusden, ‘Interview with Judith Wright McKinney’ side 1/1) and a few years later, she notes that she felt it ‘was a very great loss, at the beginning’ (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf ’ 4). In her autobiography Half a Lifetime (1999), she writes that she was ‘completely cast down’ (152) when she received her diagnosis from her Sydney doctor. Once she finished university, she also found that her disability limited her options for employment. Although she had some hearing, it was not enough to communicate with ease. She was interested in anthropology and Aboriginal peoples but she told Rusden, ‘you can’t be out in the field with Aborigines [sic], unable to hear what they’re saying or understand them’ (‘Interview with Judith Wright McKinney’ side 1/4). During the Second World War she wanted to enlist in the women’s forces but was ‘turned down on account of her deafness’ (Brady 92). She found a role as a statistician at the University of Queensland, and although the position did not require much talking, communication was still a strain. Old Government House, where she worked, was ‘terribly cramped and it was also very noisy. So that trying to communicate with people in the job often entailed a great deal of shouting’ (qtd in Rusden, ‘Interview with Judith Wright McKinney’ side 1/3). As her back faced the door in her office, she could not hear people coming and going, nor what they were saying, so she put a mirror on her typewriter to see them (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf ’ 6–7). Deafness also caused Wright social embarrassment, particularly as a young woman. Hearing aids of the time were primitive and consisted of, as Wright describes, an ‘enormous great battery strapped to the side of your knee, and strings coming up inside your underclothes … [and] an amplifier on your chest, and [a] very unpleasant sort of little plug-in for the ear itself ’ (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf ’ 3). Wright tried to conceal the wires beneath her clothes but they were still obvious (Brady 126). It was, Wright observes, ‘a very clumsy way of living’ (qtd in Rusden, ‘Interview with Judith Wright McKinney’ side 1/3). This clumsiness materialised in other ways. Communication was a constant strain as her hearing became worse: she needed to face people to lipread them and even then she never caught all of their words; she learned sign language, although she was not proficient enough to be fluent; and when going about her daily life, such as walks in the bush, her husband Jack had to run ahead and ‘talk to her walking backwards’ (Brady 200), or if she was with her friend Kathleen McArthur, Kathleen had to walk by her side and ‘let Judith do all the talking’ (180). It was difficult to have fluidity in her exchanges with people. While sound was always present until the last decade of Wright’s life and she could hear relatively well with a hearing aid, processing sound was a struggle. She points to the exhaustion this occasioned: I have to listen and watch, and … interpret. Now those are three very tiring things to have to do at length. So that one thing most people don’t realise, is that as you go on with a long conversation, or indeed, with a long radio program or anything like that, progressively your hearing gets … rather worse because of tiredness, weariness, being unable to concentrate for so long at such a level of concentration. (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf ’ 13) This fatigue, which is common to deaf people, is exacerbated when people assume that a deaf person is hearing more than they actually can. Wright did not find that people were ‘very much better at communicating if they do know you’re deaf … Because it is an unconscious problem – you’re talking to somebody and they’re replying, then you tend to go on talking as though they weren’t deaf ’ (25–26). In other words, she had an invisible disability and was able to ‘pass’ as a hearing 244

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person. The pressure to do this would have been pronounced because of the stigma associated with disability. Wright conceded, ‘[n]aturally, you’re vain, you don’t want to admit that you are as deaf as you are, that that makes a problem for people too, no doubt’ (25). As she was able to hide her disability and get by with the hearing that she had, Wright did not identify with a culture that had its own language: sign. A culturally deaf person is denoted by the capitalisation of the word ‘Deaf,’ whereas uncapitalised ‘deaf ’ ‘refers to the audiological condition of deafness’ (Woodward 285). People who are Deaf do not see themselves as having a disability. Rather, Deafness is a culture with its own language and history, much like that of Italians or Jewish people. Although towards the end of her life Wright was aware of organisations that promoted deafness and was asked to be their representative (she turned this down on account of the volume of her correspondence), at the time that she began to lose her hearing, Deaf culture in Australia was fallowing (it would be reactivated with the creation of Deaf Australia in the 1980s), so a model for developing a Deaf identity was not available to Wright, particularly as she did not associate with Deaf people (‘History and Achievements’). She did not consider writing about deafness as she did not feel ‘it was an important part of my life in that way’ (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf ’ 28). She also mused that ‘I think it quite possible of course, that I unconsciously avoid the subject of deafness, just because I am deaf ’ (31). Despite her tiredness and discomfort, deafness reaffirmed Wright’s commitment to writing. When her job at the university in Brisbane was threatened by returning servicemen (equal opportunity in the workforce not being available at that time), she thought: It was now clear what my future was likely to be. I could no longer hope to earn a living by doing anything in the commercial or academic world. My deafness would increase and the hostility to women holding well-paid jobs would do also. I could perhaps hope to live by writing. (Half a Lifetime 240) Later, she observed that ‘writers are rather solitary types anyway, so I wasn’t as badly off, I think, as most people would have been’ (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf ’ 4). Deafness was therefore twinned with Wright’s decision to become a writer, but critical attention to the ways in which it impacted on her craft is scant.

Dwelling on Silence Numerous critics have commented on the role of silence in Wright’s oeuvre. Paul Kane, in a chapter titled ‘Wright and Silence’ in Australian Poetry, considers how silence and sound are yoked as absence and presence in her poetry. He proposes that ‘silence functions as a trope for negativity’ (169), a concept which he outlines through Wright’s exposure of the reluctance of white Australians to discuss atrocities committed against Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. Poet Jaya Savige continues this theme, pointing to Wright’s attempts to ‘redress those Australian silences so central to her life’s work.’ He refers to Wright’s lecture ‘Aboriginals in Australian Poetry,’ in which she ‘observed how “a great silence falls” upon Australian poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the country’s traditional custodians were reduced to “a more or less invisible people” in literature as in life.’ In a similar vein, Nicholas Kankahainen points to colonial perceptions of Australia as ‘silent,’ because it was not accompanied by familiar European sounds such as water or the industrial sounds of cities; Europeans were yet to name the world that they encountered, and there was a very ‘material’ silencing because Aboriginal peoples had been massacred (‘Refiguring the Silence’; The Rupture of Silence). He illustrates how Wright defies this silencing, for her ‘attentiveness to the calls and behaviour of birds initiates her into a sense of land, animals and plants that challenges Euro-Australian descriptions of the landscape’ (‘Refiguring the Silence’ 8). 245

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Of these critics, only Kane and Kankahainen mention Wright’s deafness, and in both instances their references are fleeting. Kane writes at the end of his essay: In one sense, in her poetry, Judith Wright has always been in possession of such silence; in another sense, that silence could be said to have found her when, at the age of seventy-seven, her already weakened hearing finally left her deaf. (169) As has been outlined, silence could not have ‘found’ Wright as it was something she was required to grapple with from her early 20s. Meanwhile Kankahainen writes: Silence has long been a feature of Wright’s life, something she encountered in many different ways. Aside from the progressive deafness Wright experienced in her twenties …, Wright often … sought to recuperate silence: drawing attention to is existence, and demonstrating how silence itself could be viewed as a distinct presence. (‘Refiguring the Silence’) Even here, the mention of Wright’s deafness (which is not replicated in Kankahainen’s 2015 thesis) is neatly sidestepped with the phrase ‘aside from.’ Yet Wright’s disability was integral to her life and it was impossible for her to put it to one side. While these scholars are astute in their observations on the role of silence in Wright’s life, a consideration of Wright’s deafness refracts new light on her writing and its practice. It explains, for example, her legendary correspondence, her attentiveness to her fellow living beings, and some of the characteristics of her work, such as the inclusion of sensory detail and the theme of the limits of language.

Literary Exchanges Deafness brings disadvantages when it comes to interpersonal relationships, largely because of stigma and the lack of understanding of a disability that is not immediately obvious. When Wright received her diagnoses of otosclerosis, the lover she was seeing dropped her because ‘he was scared’ (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf’ 1). This reaction underscores Wright’s reasons for appearing not to be as deaf as she was, and perhaps for deciding not to explore deafness in her work. When her friend, the artist and writer Barbara Blackman, who was blind, complained that an editor of the Sydney Morning Herald would ‘welcome me if I’d write about being blind – was [not] interested in my ordinary line of stuff at all’ (Wright, Portrait of a Friendship 448), Wright replied, ‘[f]ew people know I’m deaf because hearing aids disguise the fact – unless I run out of battery or people try to talk to me from the wrong angle. Not so easy to get away with blindness, in any respect’ (449). From this it appears that Wright preferred not to draw attention to her disability. Susan Sheridan is the single literary critic to have attended to Wright’s deafness at any length, focusing on Wright’s correspondence with Blackman. Their epistolary friendship, which spanned 50 years until Wright’s death in 2000, continued even after technologies that Barbara might have preferred – telephone and audiotape recordings – became more easily available. By that time Judith’s hearing had deteriorated to such an extent that taped letters or phone calls would not have suited her at all. (205) Sheridan also observes that letters, in Wright’s later years, ‘were the deaf poet’s lifeline to the rest of the world, living alone as she did for most of the last 35 years of her life’ (214). In this, Wright slotted into a tradition of deaf epistolarians which includes Mabel Bell, the deaf wife of Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Mabel was a prolific correspondent, although her husband’s replies were few (Brueggemann 117–140). In The Woman at Home, a British monthly magazine which 246

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began in 1893, female epistolary networks were recommended as a panacea for the loneliness of deafness (Gooday and Sayer 55–59). Wright was a prolific correspondent. Three volumes of her letters have been edited to date (With Love and Fury [2006], The Equal Heart and Mind [2004], Portrait of a Friendship [2007]), while her daughter Meredith recalls how ‘sometimes for hours during the day the typewriter would thunder away in the study while the correspondence was dealt with’ (Wright, With Love and Fury ix). While these letters were largely ‘transient vehicles of communication’ (ix) which helped maintain Wright’s friendships, ameliorate her isolation, and propel the causes about which she was passionate, her deafness also likely dictated their volume. It would have been easier for Wright to write rather than talk on the telephone or in person, particularly as her hearing deteriorated. Letter writing was not just an addendum to her life, but something that was inevitably shaped by the conditions of it. Meredith’s recollection of her mother’s furious typing conjures an image of Wright communicating with her fellow humans beyond her home. Yet she also observed and interacted with creatures within her home. In Networked Language, Philip Mead (and, later, Stuart Cooke in his essay on Wright’s relationship with Mount Tamborine) meditates upon Wright’s long poem ‘Habitat,’ in which she writes about the house in which she lived with Jack and Meredith, in which ‘[i]n your spaces and awkward corners/ we spread our lives out, fitted and grew together’ (Wright, Collected Poems 299). Mead dwells upon the meaning of ‘habitat’ and describes it, in the sense of the poem, as ‘a word that, rather than anthropomorphising the house, exclusively and androcentrically, conjoins the human and the non-human. Plants, animals and humans all have their habitats, the “natural” locations of their life-cycles, their homes, as we say’ (318). Wright was extraordinarily happy in this house, which was home to other inhabitants such as an ‘eight-foot carpet snake,’ ‘possums, nice, spiders. / A blossom-bat’ and ‘mud-wasps’ and ‘cicadas’ (Wright, Collected Poems 299). She writes of a reciprocity with those with whom she shares her home: Your old trees dying warmed us with winter fires. Your birdcalls, mice in cupboards, snakes in the garden, made welcomes and nuisances for us, panics and symbols. We ceased to be strangers. Oiling your creaking hinges, cursing your ill-hung doors, we changed in mute exchanges. (308)

Although a variety of conversations and exchanges happened in this house, silence, too, was a part of it. As Wright explained in her interview with Rusden, ‘[s]ilence is my habitat’ (‘On Being Deaf ’ 21). The implications of this – that deafness was her home – surely shaped her relationship to the other-than-humans with whom she shared her oikos. Having lost one sense, her other four – particularly her vision – were augmented, and her watchfulness meant she saw much that crossed her path, which other people with all their sense may have missed.

Four Senses Wright’s awareness of perception and how this was shaped by her senses, particularly as one of them was compromised, is evident in the titular poem of her 1963 volume of selected poems, Five Senses: Now my five senses gather into a meaning all acts, all presences; and as a lily gathers the elements together, in me this dark and shining, that stillness and that moving, these shapes that spring from nothing,

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The first stanza of this poem focuses on containment through the image of the lily gathering elements like nutrients in a bulb, and, on cohesion, through the shapes that become a rhythm and ‘pure design.’ The second stanza, by contrast, appears to show the narrator unravelling. While in the first stanza the narrator’s sensory perception builds into a form, in the second it sends her ‘spinning,’ creating an impression of confusion. Meaning, in this stanza, is not something contained, rather it is a ‘web’ – a vulnerable thing prone to breaking – and she cannot apprehend it. Critic Shirley Walker considers the final two lines (‘a rhythm that dances / and is not mine’ [lines 19–20]) as referring to ‘the genesis and growth of the poem in the unconscious level of the mind’ (79), but perhaps, given the sense of estrangement in the final line, Wright is suggesting that the ‘rhythm that dances’ is not hers because she does not have all five of her senses. Wright’s difficulty with hearing is not evident in her writing (which uses rhyme and onomatopoeia), because she was able to hear well until the age of 22 and so retained a memory of sound. In her 1990 interview she observes that she was able ‘to look at a bird, see that it’s singing and practically hear its song, because I know the song’ (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf,’ 29). However, while she was still able to recall sound, the loss of one sense resulted in the heightening of her other four senses. When the brain is deprived of information from one sense, it often compensates by processing input from another, a process known as ‘cross-modal plasticity.’ There are a large number of anecdotal reports of people who have lost one of their senses who then show extraordinary ability with one or more of their remaining senses (see Frasnelli et al.). Wright observed that deafness … certainly sharpened … my visual perception, the fact that I was using my eyes far more than most people – because most people have a sort of general mixture of senses to call on … And I think that the usual response to your surroundings is a mixture of all your senses, and therefore, when you lose one you tend to develop another more and more as you … as you go on, as a compensation. (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf ’ 14) This accords with research which shows that some deaf people have enhanced motion detection, visual orienting, and attention in their peripheral vision (see Scott et al.). People who sign need to focus on the movement of hands and faces, but even those who are not signers still need to pick up activity in the corner of their eye, such as a bus coming towards them which they might not hear. This goes some way towards accounting for Wright’s extraordinary attention to other-than-humans, particularly the ways they move through their environments and communicate with one another. One only has to pick up Wright’s collection Birds (2003) to recognise the pleasures that vision holds for her. In ‘Parrots’ she writes of herself and (presumably) her husband Jack: shivering in the mountain cold we draw the curtains back and see the lovely greed of their descending,

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Wright reads the birds’ movement as a ‘lilt of flight,’ infusing sound into the physical arc of their movement, creating an overflow of sensation from one sense to another, much like the way their beating wings blur their colours: crimson, green, and gold. The delight she derives from the view is signalled visually by the opening of the curtains to reveal the birds, and also physically, through the shift from her cold body to the warmth the spectacle brings. Vision is also a factor in Wright’s anger about the dispossession of Australian Aboriginal peoples and the appropriation and degradation of their country. In her collection of essays, Born of the Conquerors, she titles one essay ‘Learning to Look,’ and opens thus: It has taken two hundred year of effort with axes and shovels and tractors and bulldozers to make us begin to release that Australia can never be made into that ‘new Brittania’ we have tried to make. Now at last we are beginning to see it a little more clearly than we did. (97) Wright draws the reader through a brief survey of the continent’s deep time, and the unique plants and animals to which this gave rise. She closes with the exhortation: ‘Look back once more on the very beginning of life, through those millennia, and know that it is not ours to destroy’ (98), because ‘the continent’s first people... own it still (we have never bought it from them)’ (98). This visual attention to the impact of colonisation on Australia’s environment is one of the reasons why Kate Rigby refers to Wright as an ‘ecoprophet,’ bearing witness in poems such as ‘Dust’ (1985) to the disastrous environmental impact of European farming methods on Australia’s environment. ‘Prophetic speech,’ Rigby explains, ‘is inspired by the imaginative capacity to see through and beyond those conventional attitudes, assumptions and patterns of behaviour that engender or support oppression and wrongdoing’ (178). Rodney Hall, who looked to Wright as an ‘inspirational figure’ (Brady 176), imagined her experience of deafness in a community hall through his piece ‘The Conservationist’ (2011), and described Wright as ‘at all times ready to rise to her feet without preamble, eloquent as a fighting prophet’ (32). Brigid Rooney also observes that ‘the overriding representation of Judith Wright that emerges from the mass of media, biographical and critical material (not just Brady’s and Wright’s) is an austere image of the poet as public prophet’ (5). A prophet can articulate events before they happen because they have vision, but perhaps Wright was ‘visionary’ because her disability conditioned her to pay attention to her surroundings. Additionally, to refer to Wright as a prophet in the symbolic sense can be problematic not only because, as Rooney writes, it belies the complexity of her work, depoliticises her activism and writing, and removes her to the plane of the politically correct (5), but also because symbolism can hide the very real difficulties of living with a disability in a world designed for able-bodied people. Such difficulties manifested in one of the most significant themes of Wright’s writing: the limits of language and perception.

Deafness and Metaphysics Robert Brissenden, in his review of Wright’s Five Senses, proposes that Wright is a metaphysical poet on account of the ‘themes with which she is preoccupied – the nature of reality and how we apprehend it, the status of values, the problem of meaning and communication’ (87). In glossing another poem in the volume, ‘Interplay,’ he considers the questions the poem raises: ‘How do we experience the world around us? How do we make this experience meaningful? How does 249

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the character of the one who perceives affect his perception? Does it, perhaps, affect what he perceives?’ (88). These questions relate directly to the ways in which Wright’s hearing shaped her perception of her surroundings and her awareness of the limits of this perception; however, a connection between deafness and these limitations has not yet been made. Through his analysis of Wright’s poem ‘Conch-Shell’ (1949), a meditation on the conch and its interior, Cooke illustrates how Wright was ‘willing to journey to the limits of the lyric form, but also that the capacity of the lyric voice to speak for all things was being questioned from a very early stage in her career’ (193). Likewise Kankahainen points to Wright’s ‘conscious marking of the very limitations of language, of the degree to which we can only partially see, and describe, all of the elements that contribute to a particular scene as we experience it’ (4). In this he draws on Rigby’s concept of ‘negative poetics’ which ‘sings the praises of the living Earth in an aesthetic frame that acknowledges the impossibility of capturing its phenomenality in writing, or even of responding entirely adequately to its call’ (Rigby, ‘Writing in the Anthropocene’ 177). It is worth considering how Wright’s deafness contributes to this aspect of her poetry. When a deaf person must strain to constantly catch a voice and know that they may not have caught everything, they become aware that their point of view is provisional and that there are always other voices in conversation which cannot be heard. To Rusden, Wright described the process of lipreading: ‘There are words in any case, and indeed whole sentences, that are practically … they don’t … they are not visible on the face at all. A word like “scissors”’ (‘On Being Deaf’ 36). Wright knows the words are there, but she cannot capture them. Likewise, she knew how easily language could be broken. She explains, ‘[y] ou’re trying to fit a sentence together, so that when somebody turns away … and you’re still trying to work out whether they said “mummy” or “puppy”’ (36). As someone who had to strain and fight for sound and meaning, Wright knew meaning could break, like the spider’s web in ‘Five Senses,’ as soon as someone turned their head away. While this was undeniably tiring for Wright, she remained alive to the possibility of listening, not just to humans but also to other-than-humans, and to the difficulty of translating its life into a sound that humans can comprehend and admire. As a lipreader, Wright was also a translator: she watched the shape of a mouth and paired it with clues such as body language and the context of a conversation to make sense of what was going on. She would have watched birds and animals the same way, noting their plumage (as she does with the rainbow parrots’ ‘crimson, green and gold’ [line 16] in the abovementioned ‘Parrots’), the movement of their muscles, their lines of flight, to see where they were going and how they might have existed in the world as she existed in hers. Her attentiveness to, and understanding of, a creature’s oikos appears in her poem ‘Rainforest’ (1985): The forest drips and glows with green. The tree-frog croaks his far-off song. His voice is stillness, moss and rain drunk from the forest ages long. We cannot understand that call unless we move into his dream, where all is one and one is all and frog and python are the same. We with our quick dividing eyes measure, distinguish and are gone. The forest burns, the tree-frog dies, yet one is all and all are one. (Collected Poems 380–381; lines 1–12)

Wright appeals to her reader to understand the tree frog’s world by moving into its ‘dream’ and to understand the world it inhabits. Her simple but vivid lines also translate not only the frog’s world but also one of the fundamental tenets of ecology – that ‘one is all and all are one’ – and that to burn the forest (as the terrible bushfires of the summer of 2019 and 2020 demonstrated) 250

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is to destroy the ecosystems that keep humans alive. In this quiet poem Wright illuminates how, as eco-crip critic Anthony J. Nocella writes, ‘[t]he ecological world, or biosphere, is itself an argument for respecting differing abilities and the uniqueness of all living beings’ (143). Deafness contributed to Wright’s ecological consciousness and her awareness that there are other modes of being, as well as other voices that humans cannot, or do not wish to, hear.

Listening, not Hearing In her interview about deafness with Rusden, Wright discussed metaphors relating to blindness and deafness, musing that ‘there is something about blindness that is poetic’ (31), as in the Middle Ages, some harpists were blind and ‘they were led around and they were … seers, they were regarded as special people’ (qtd in Rusden, ‘On Being Deaf ’ 31). However, if you are deaf, she continues with a laugh, ‘you don’t get … the same kind of “credit” let’s say’ (31). Rather, ‘we use the fact that people are deaf to any communication or to understanding, that they turn off’ (31). Wright adds that she ‘can’t think of any poets who use [deafness] … as a metaphor’ (31), although in her poem ‘Lament for Passenger Pigeons’ she uses it herself. Mourning the extinction of passenger pigeons, she asks: How reinvent that passenger, its million wings and hues, when we have lost the bird, the thing itself, the sheen of life on flashing long migrations? Might human musics hold it, could we hear? Trapped in the fouling nests of time and space, we turn the music on; but it is man, and it is man who leans a deafening ear. (Collected Poems 319; lines 7–12)

Wright’s use of ‘deafening ear’ reflects her embeddedness in a hearing world which does not much contemplate the implications of deafness. Perhaps if she had known other deaf people more intimately, she might have considered the ways in which these metaphors can be used. Phrases such as ‘to fall on deaf ears’ or ‘to be deaf to,’ for example, are not only lazy and hackneyed, but inaccurate. Given that sound travels in all direction and is not influenced by gravity, it cannot ‘fall,’ while people who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing are relentlessly attentive listeners – they must be, in order to catch information they might otherwise miss. Despite her deployment of this cliché, Wright was impacted by the very real difficulties of living in a world largely ignorant to deaf people. ‘Most people don’t have to listen,’ she explained to Rusden, ‘they just hear’ (‘On Being Deaf ’ 13). It is ironic that scholars with all their hearing, who are adept at reading and interpreting, have rarely contemplated the implications of deafness for a trailblazing writer with a significant hearing loss. While Wright was aware of and listened attentively to other voices, both human and other-than-human, her efforts were not returned, as she observed: ‘I think the … it’s the imaginative capacity to … empathise with deaf people, that is a problem for many people’ (26). This lack of empathy is apparent in the perception of deafness as a hindrance or a disability that must remain hidden. This is a false perception, for the condition reaps many rewards. It enabled Wright to shut out the world and focus on the task at hand, as she commented, ‘I was always a writer, and I suppose [deafness] has made some kind of difference to the amount I’ve written – the fact that I haven’t had to have a job, go out into the field, that kind of thing’ (12). In a letter to Barbara Blackman written when she was 78, Wright commented that she had ‘at last got round to working on that autobiography stuff I have been threatening to embark on for years’ and that she was ‘finding 251

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deafness rather an advantage in getting such jobs underway – I can close my door and ignore visitors entirely’ (Portrait of a Friendship 591). Her singleminded focus was highlighted by Hall: She could not be persuaded, nor could she be corrupted. And if she ever needed reassurance, the deafness itself taught her the bitter injustice of the way things are: she cared nothing for money for money or fame. She would simply have her say, when meetings were held in the shabby dimness of a local hall, raising her arm to be counted. (31–32) Deafness not only facilitated focus in Wright’s life and on the page, but also enabled her attentiveness to the natural world and helped her to understand the limits of human perception and voice. Above all, it was a creative condition, as she writes in her poem ‘Silence’: Silence is the rock where I shall stand. Oh, when I strike it with my hand may the artesian waters spring from that dark source I long to find. (Collected Poems 121; lines 12–15)

Deafness was Wright’s ‘dark source.’ In some ways it was an absence or a lack, but in many others it was a presence, affirming the voices of those who are often unheard in Australia, such as Aboriginal peoples and the other-than-human, and illuminating their agency and right to life. Deafness was ultimately a creative condition that contributed to Wright’s extraordinary oeuvre, and an acknowledgement of her disability’s impact upon her craft is long overdue.

Note 1 Permission to quote from Judith Wright’s poetry in this chapter provided by HarperCollins Australia.

Works Cited Brady, Veronica. South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1998. Brissenden, R.F. ‘Five Senses.’ Australian Quarterly (1964): 85–91. Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places. New York: New York UP, 2009. Cooke, Stuart. ‘Unsettling Sight: Judith Wright’s Journey into History and Ecology on Mt Tamborine.’ Queensland Review 22.2 (2015): 191–201. Frasnelli, Johannes, et al. ‘Crossmodal Plasticity in Sensory Loss.’ Progress in Brain Research 191 (2011): 233–249. Gooday, Graeme, and Karen Sayer. Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss in Britain, 1830–1930. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Hall, Rodney. Silence: (Fictions). Sydney, NSW: Murdoch, 2011. ‘History and Achievements.’ Deaf Australia. Nd. . Kane, Paul. Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Kankahainen, Nicholas. ‘Refiguring the Silence of the Euro-Australian Landscapes.’ JASAL 15.1 (2015). . ———. The Rupture of Silence: Judith Wright’s Refiguration of Australian Colonial Silence. Unpublished MA diss. Monash U, 2015. Mead, Philip. Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry. Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly, 2008. Nocella II, Anthony J. ‘Defining Eco-Ability: Social Justice and the Intersectionality of Disability, Nonhuman Animals, and Ecology.’ Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory. Ed. Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2017. 141–167. Rigby, Kate. ‘Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?’ Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009). .

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Judith Wright, Writing, and Deafness Rooney, Brigid. Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009. Rusden, Heather. ‘Interview with Judith Wright McKinney.’ 1987–1988. National Library of Australia Oral History Project. ———. ‘On Being Deaf.’ Interview with Judith Wright. 27 Jun. 1990. National Library of Australia. Savige, Jaya. ‘“Creation’s Holiday”: On Silence and Monsters in Australian Poetry.’ Poetry 208.2 (2016): 169–184. Scott, Gregory D., et al. ‘Enhanced Peripheral Visual Processing in Congenitally Deaf Humans is Supported by Multiple Brain Regions, including Primary Auditory Cortex.’ Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8.177 (2014). . Sheridan, Susan. ‘A Friendship in Letters: The Correspondence of Judith Wright and Barbara Blackman.’ Life Writing 8.2 (2011): 203–217. Walker, Shirley. The Poetry of Judith Wright: A Search for Unity. London: Edward Arnold, 1980. Woodward, James, and Thomas P. Horejes. ‘deaf/Deaf: Origins and Usage.’ The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2016. 285–287. Wright, Judith. Five Senses: Selected Poems. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1963. ———. Born of the Conquerors: Selected Essays. Acton, ACT: Aboriginal Studies, 1991. ———. Collected Poems, 1942–1985. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1994. ———. Half a Lifetime. Ed. Patricia Clarke. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 1999. ———. Birds: Poems. Canberra, ACT: National Library of Australia, 2003. ———. The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney. Ed. Patricia Clarke. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2004. ———. With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright. Ed. Patricia Clarke. Canberra, ACT: National Library of Australia, 2006. ———. Portrait of a Friendship: The Letters of Judith Wright and Barbara Blackman, 1950–2000. Ed. Patricia Clarke. Melbourne, VIC: Miegunyah, 2007.

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26 ASYLUM SEEKERS AND REFUGEES IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE Daniel Hourigan

Let us begin with an analytic distinction between what I will refer to as refugee characters and refugee figures. In Nam Le’s short story collection The Boat (2009), the migrant protagonist of the opening chapter endures the frustrations of his writing as he tries to resist the call to an ethnic literature because of the overidentification that this work would require. Such a move, the protagonist fears, will unduly align his self-image with the exploited, tokenistic spectacle of trauma that besets the genre (Ommundsen 509). The protagonist insists that he wants to write ‘those old verities’ of Whitman (Le 10), procuring the irony that what is most Whitmanesque is his resolution to ‘do’ ethnic literature in his own way, to be true to the work itself, despite its exploitative edge. This dynamic captures a curio at the core of the commercial imperatives that buttress Australian literatures concerned with refugee narratives. More pressingly, critics such as Donald C. Goellnicht have noted how such valorised refugee narratives of the twenty-first century place refugee figures at their centre in stories that juxtapose the aestheticising postcolonial cosmopolitanism of the twentieth century (207). Le’s The Boat and its reception are instructive of a point of difference between ‘characters’ that are a part of a diegesis, and much more abstract figurations or ‘refugee figures’ in criticism’s intercessions into a given text, as with Simoes da Silva’s formulation: ‘that is to say that the refugee exists only, or perhaps most of all, insofar as she or he poses a challenge to the nation-state as presently constituted’ (68). The question thus becomes, then, how we are to understand the characterisation of refugees in figurative language that approximates the type of social link highlighted by Simoes da Silva. Here it is useful to point to the humanising compassion at play in Tom Keneally and Rosie Scott’s A Country Too Far (2013). This collection is an attempt to articulate a compassionate discourse that develops empathy for refugees by telling their stories. Yet, as some critics have noted, the volume does not succeed in interrupting the complicity with the dehumanisation of refugees by humanitarian discourses (Simoes da Silva 73; Dudek 17; Goellnicht 220; Herrero 954; Jacklin 377; Nabizadeh 354). This complicity may be understood as an iteration of the psychoanalytic concept of identification or, all are subject to the (symbolic) law (Lacan 50). To put this another way, the limitation of the mode of A Country Too Far presents us with an obvious question: if complicity with the law is what constitutes a refugee as being in a state of exception, is this the price of compassionate inaction? What is the other side, the symbolic debt, of this limit of compassion? Nationalist arguments tend to foreclose on this question by instead seeking to instrumentalise which minorities are ‘worthy’ of the protection and privileges of the nation-state (Žižek 96). Such nationalism commonly promotes paranoia about national security, border control, racialised biographies, and methods of arrival. This conservative paranoia has been a major 254

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focus of scholarship in the Humanities, broadly focused on Australia since the ‘Pacific Solution’ was first implemented by the Australian government under John Howard’s prime ministership in 2001, and was subsequently endorsed by all future governments, whatever their party loyalties, up to the present day (Phillips; Davidson). Paranoia is the correct critical term for this collection of phenomena because it captures something of the way that government policies regarding refugees since 2001 have been reactively imagined in response to the inability to reliably predict or register the arrival of exiled persons through unconventional means, as was verified by the second reading speech for the Migration Legislation Amendment (Regional Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2012 (Cth) by then Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Chris Bowen (Commonwealth of Australia 10945). This paranoia is directly addressed by those works of compassion such as Keneally and Scott’s collection, which place the ‘healing power’ of literature as their raison d’etre (1–2). Yet, by humanising and subjectivising the narratives of refugees without an ethics of responsibility for complicit positioning of refugee figures as exceptional, Keneally and Scott’s collection and the heavy-handed exceptionalism of nationalist paranoia are, properly speaking, two sides of the same coin. Positioning refugees as suffering humiliating indignities and existential struggles for survival is precisely the task of both of these modes of narrativisation. Why is it that such a humanising compassionate vision does not appear convincing in critical terms? Or, to put this in another more politico-legal way, why is the figure of the refugee excepted from the liberal standard at the heart of a reasonable person tested by the legal system that excludes them? As stated above, several critics have noted how the figure of the refugee in Australian literature is constituted by a state of exception: ‘the refugee exists only, or perhaps most of all, insofar as she or he poses a challenge to the nation-state as presently constituted’ (Simoes da Silva 68). In practical terms this state of exception affects the saleability of all migrant and refugee narratives since, as Michelle Cahill has argued, it works ‘to position them as reductive stereotypes of survival and confrontation’ (198). Therefore, narrative labours such as A Country Too Far tread on a highly charged terrain that punishes refugee figures with impunity by exposing the indignities that they have suffered in the frame of compassion that excepts the refugee figure from ordinary ethical standards. We can observe the decay of the symbolic efficacy of ethical responsibility in favour of the culde-sac of exceptionalism in the past several decades of deliberate political recoding of the refugee of post-Second World War migration in Australian nomenclature. This shift is marked by the way that the refugee has become the asylum seeker: the stateless person in flight, often for their lives, supposedly often arriving by irregular maritime means. The literary response to a contemporary refugee discourse is therefore always a politico-legal response because it must intercede in the arbitrations of the Australian state that sustains the exceptionalism around refugees. Such a response is always-already bound up with biopolitical questions of the modern nation-state, including the sovereign right to refuse to aid others. Indeed, in recent history the domestic privilege of nation-states to decide how to treat arriving refugees is often held up for our consideration in literature that is in stark contrast to the extant obligations found in ratified international law such as the treaties and conventions to which Australia is a signatory. The all-too-human suffering of refugee characters is therefore a dangerous, unruly thing for a strong or weak politics of ‘nation’: too strong a position seems to be deliberately callous and immoral, too weak a position seems morally bankrupt and unable to think its complicity in the systemic denigration of the figure of the refugee. Both positions here rely on the figure of the refugee being exoticised and Orientalised as a scapegoat for a White guilt that does not see its own racialised notions of those ‘persons’ that it deems worthy of its protection – in the sense that ‘race’ is always-already coded as ‘non-White’ (Ommundsen 510). As Frantz Fanon argued in his seminal Black Skin, White Masks (1967), both coloniser and colonised are implicated in this presumption and suppress attempts to disrupt racial cultural constructs through the normative politics of identity. But we must take care here: for Fanon, Whiteness is not defined as a white individual who oppresses other races. Instead, 255

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‘Whiteness [is] a category inflected by class, capacity and gender’ (Cahill 199). For example, reflecting on her own experience as a ‘coloured writer,’ Cahill has noted: ‘It’s a two-way process, conditioned from childhood, that first encounter with difference, which positions subjects hierarchically. It is not the white individual who dominates other races’ (199). Therefore, the traumatic conditions of many refugee biographies often unintentionally play into this illusion of refugee as a static category with a human story that is already Othered. For Whiteness, the refugee is a tortious figure defined by a dissenting difference. Mahboba Rawi’s memoir Mahboba’s Promise (2005) is an exemplar for the way that Whiteness conditions contemporary refugee narratives by generating peculiar distortions in the functions of realist prose. Rawi arrived in Australia in the mid-1980s after marrying another Afghan who had Australian permanent residency. Here, it is helpful to note that although Rawi fled Afghanistan as a refugee, in Mahboba’s Promise she identifies herself as a displaced person. Rawi had been politically active since her school days, ‘painting banners with anti-Russian slogans, burning communist books from the school library, and forming links with protestors from other schools’ ( Jacklin 379). Michael Jacklin notes that this early biographical section of Mahboba’s Promise develops the effect of dissent on Rawi’s subjectivity as a mark of ‘her assertion and determination’ (382), for instance the inclusion of her name in The Age newspaper’s ‘The 50 Australians Who Matter.’ So, while dissent is a negative difference that defines Rawi’s subjectivity against the complicit background of residency in Australia, it also validates her identity in the normative standards of Australian culture and contemporary society. A dilemma emerges at this point, however, particularly in Jacklin’s reading, where Rawi’s personal history beyond the narrative of Mahboba’s Promise is equated with her later status in Australia that reads down the traumatic rupture of her life and fight for survival. Jacklin positions this reading in his conclusion: Refugee narratives can negotiate their way into the public sphere. In doing so, however, dissent almost necessarily gives way to conciliation and integration as former refugee subjects attempt to realign their lives in terms that will provide the best outcomes for themselves and their families. (382) The political and cultural activist role of literature therefore gives way to a humanism that ‘has the power to interrogate the templates of received wisdoms and offer fresh new perspectives that may enlighten and transform us’ (Lokugé 560), but ultimately does not disturb this fetish for the traumatised Other and their horrific biography. The fetishism that surrounds the trauma of the Other-qua-refugee has a distinct logic that affects its proximity to the social link regulated by law. This logic has elsewhere been articulated as ‘treated as though guilty, until proven innocent,’ a perversion of the common law principle of habeas corpus (Mares qtd in Dudek 17). As every good law student knows, in Australian common law habeas corpus is a ‘writ’ issued by a superior court that declares a person is to be afforded a hearing within a court of law prior to remaining imprisoned. While this is a relatively straightforward rule, the close proximity of the common law to public morality is represented by the legal cases that are the sites of the decisions that create and reinforce such a principle. As such, it may nonetheless be easy to mistake the common law principle of habeas corpus as a universal principle of Australian mores, because its operation is largely unchecked and unchallenged by the morality of Australian citizens who come before the courts. To provide some balance to this minor, awry reading, it is important to recall that the Australian legal system itself presumes a duty to the court and to the client, but that the right to representation is secondary to the obligation to the court and the rule of law. The mandatory detention of refugees seeking asylum in Australia has not, however, upheld this presumption. As a 2013 judicial review of the Australian Human Rights Commission found in response to the question of ‘how far is the right of anyone deprived of his or her liberty to bring 256

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proceedings before court part of the laws of your country?’ issued by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, there are two parts to answering this query (5). First, Australia’s superior courts ‘have jurisdiction to grant a writ of habeas corpus (or orders in the nature of habeas corpus) in order to secure the release of an applicant from illegal detention’ (Australian Human Rights Commission 5). Second, ‘the requirement that the detention be illegal before habeas corpus can issue is a limitation on the remedy’ (Australian Human Rights Commission 5–6). In practice, this means that if someone is lawfully imprisoned after a conviction by a court, there are not valid grounds for a writ to be issued. In addition, this means that prolonged or arbitrary detention pursuant to control orders and preventative detention orders ‘contained in counter-terrorism and national security legislation’ therefore also remains lawful under domestic law, and is thus, similarly, unable to be successfully challenged by a writ of habeas corpus (Australian Human Rights Commission 6). Although such a provision is lawful domestically, this does not absolve it of contradicting international treaties and conventions to which Australia is a signatory, such as article 9(4) of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which grants a detainee the right to have their detention reviewed by a court (Australian Human Rights Commission 7). Although Australia ratified its commitment to said treaty in 1980, the 2013 judicial review shows that the relevance of the covenant has been downplayed in the face of sovereign domestic law (United Nations Human Rights Council qtd in Australian Human Rights Commission 7). The cultural and legal imaginaries of Australian society are therefore at a crossroads that reaffirms the positioning of refugees-come-asylum seekers as Homo sacer, bare life to be punished with impunity to maintain the sovereign rule of law where only some, not all, people are worthy of the State’s protection. Given that compassion provides no ingress to remedying the exceptional status of refugee figures critically or legally, there remains the question of how the ethical space of refugees, of persons reduced to bare life, is configured. Can ethics, for example, offer us a way to resolve the impasses at work in the post-political administration of refugee figures discussed above? Debra Dudek has claimed that an ethics of compassion simply does not go far enough ‘towards creating a multicultural space in which difference is respected under conditions of tolerance’ (17). Such a recognition of difference, argues Dudek, is only achievable through a Levinasian ethics of responsibility that opens into ‘responsibility for the other’ (17). There can be little doubt that stories of migration and flight can engineer a remembering, invention, or recuperation of the tales of persecution and escape. Over the past decade multicultural children’s literature in Australia has been very active in confronting detention centre narratives (Dudek 17; Helff 67). The ethics of responsibility for the Other that Dudek pursues arises under the peculiar set of conditions of our present where the glacial mass of stories of hope and despair is now scaled to an ever-greater degree by the massive migratory movements currently taking place in response to conflicts globally. This large-scale issue is further intensified if we consider the historical precedent that Australia has received or invited negligible numbers of applications from potential migrants due to its geographic isolation. The explosion in application numbers since the 1980s and 1990s saw the frequency of applications for immigration from the hundreds to the thousands, to ‘nearly three times the size of the annual humanitarian intake’ (Nicholls qtd in Helff 68) and spurred the Australian administrators of immigration to consider themselves to be faced with a crisis. Yet were not these administrators simply confronted with the burden of the Other’s presumed existence – now made all too real – that threw their fantasies of planning ‘desirable’ populations into disarray? I cannot help but feel that, in an interpretative and historicised way, Dudek’s call to responsibility for the Other works in favour of a post-political administration becoming more hardnosed about distinctions around what constitutes a ‘valid’ path to an application for asylum. The other side of responsibility is, of course, obligation and concomitant prohibition. In terms of how refugee figures are framed by Dudek’s, Simoes da Silva’s, and others’ criticism, there are two modulations that we must consider to better understand this critical nexus 257

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established by Dudek’s call to an ethics of responsibility: one is to do with the mobilisation of lives, the other is to do with how we conceive of difference. The first that I would like to reflect upon is the shift from the politics of the person to the post-political administration of populations. In the former, we can easily place those compassionate narratives that try to evoke sympathy for the traumas not only of flight and escape, but also of application and processing. In this grouping I would venture to include Keneally and Scott’s A Country Too Far but not Le’s The Boat because of its deconstruction of ethnic narrative identities and frames and its broader attempt to deracinate couplets of self/Other, migrant/refugee, and so on. The identity politics that is to the fore of A Country Too Far’s realist fiction is here centred on creating empathetic mirrors for the fantasies of the self – to let a liberal middle-class reader imagine themselves in the shoes of someone who has lost everything, whose life hangs precariously by the thread of formalistic international legal obligations. The more spectacular, the more exotic, the more cosmopolitan, the more traumatised the Other, the ‘better’ for this genre of literature, but this is also its own moral limitation. The post-political administration of populations, however, invites the deracination of ethnic identities and exclusions to organise and assemble Homo sacer. It may be useful to recall here that for Simoes da Silva’s critique, a refugee ‘exists only, or perhaps most of all, insofar as she or he poses a challenge to the nation-state as presently constituted’ (68). Le’s short story collection, for example, works to critique the airy Eurocentric cosmopolitanism of multicultural literary criticism of the 1990s by highlighting the endemic effects of fantasies of globalised imaginaries on the traumatic histories of its refugee characters. Globalisation and international law do not assure all populations of security – far from it. Instead, particularly for Le’s collection and more speculative novels such as Locust Girl (2015) by Merlinda Bobis, borders are indeterminate and politics are organised around populations.1 For works that are grouped through this distinction, the decentred subject of Australia’s multicultural identity becomes the ambiguous marker of its demographic controls. Some critics, such as Dolores Herrero, have contended that the exception of the refugee by such controls is what Achille Mbembe has termed a ‘necropolitics,’ a situation whereby ‘a politics [is] exercised by imposing death and near-death on citizens’ (954). We should be careful here with the term ‘citizen,’ as Mbembe’s real target is the idea of populations: ‘the generalised instrumentalisation of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations’ as the ultimate goal of sovereign power (14). The deployment and manifestation of life, therefore, only serves to reinforce sovereignty and its rule over populations. In this emphasis on populations, the person is always already missing, their voice and their trauma unheard and unheeded in this mode, as with the biography of the protagonist’s father in Le’s opening story. As I have highlighted above, there are two substantive trends within the discussion thus far that we can reflexively consider. The second of these is the rethinking of difference. The idea of difference is fundamentally one of negation for the discussion of asylum seekers and refugees in Australian literature. The body of criticism surveyed in this chapter varies in how it deploys difference, but it is always a matter of negation. Curiously, only a few examples stand out for the way that they value a reconsideration of difference as a path out of the cul-de-sac of compassionate complicity for the politico-legal exception that conditions refugee figures. While this chapter has exclusively focused on current refugee narratives, refugee narratives have been around for a long time in Australian literature and confined by negative categories and minor associations. Until the 1980s, literary works by authors who found themselves in Australia after being displaced, fleeing suppression, and in flight for their lives were rarely if ever published, and those that were made little impact (Neumann 7). This rhetoric of ‘migrant authorship’ relies on the construction of a binary distinction between Australian literature and its subgenres, particularly positing a difference between the identity of Australian literature developed in the early twentieth century and what was to be later designated ethnic literature, migrant literature, transnational literature, and so on. 258

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As Elizabeth McMahon, Klaus Neumann, and Wenche Ommundsen, among others, have noted, we ought to pause here to consider that there is an important distinction between the substantive content of these narratives and the expectations of the categorisation of the work by the providence of its author’s biography. McMahon has offered up Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the ‘differend’ to resolve this absence of ‘shared terms of legitimacy’ where ‘the dispute centres on the phrasing of the dispute itself and never reaches the substantive matter’ (‘Encapsulated Space’ 28). For Lyotard, the differend can easily scale up or down depending on the relative differences of each self-ascribed entity to any other (28). Yet there must always be an oppositional ground available for a meaningful dialogue to be enacted. Lyotard’s differend derives from a reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) that targets the limits of the capacity to judge morality. Like Kant, Lyotard recognises the mutual antagonism that underlies the possibility of any differential relation. Unlike Kant, however, Lyotard investigates the overdetermination of ‘equal’ relations by the ‘rhetorical potency of current modes of argumentation’ (qtd in McMahon 29). Without an oppositional ground, ‘the negation of the negation’ to paraphrase Hegel, there is no space for meaningful progress on policy and practice. For our purposes here, the state of exception that coordinates the fantasy of a ‘refugee figure’ in Australian literature must be interrogated and intervened in so that it does not remain an analogue in which the difference between the narratives of Australians and refugees is reduced to an argument about the scale and dimensions of a crisis for immigration policy. For example, ethnic literature is a hot topic when the traumatised ethnic Other is the object of an ongoing crisis of migrant intake numbers, yet no two works of ethnic literature are going to necessarily whitewash the identity politics that define the precarious situation of flight and exile. Therefore, the figure of the refugee in Australian literature presents a hardnosed, further challenge to think against the potent rhetoric of emergency and crisis. This chapter has argued that asylum seekers and refugees are significant characters and figures for Australian literature for the ways that their stories challenge the exceptionalism of Australian society and politics. The contemporary moment of Australian literature is past the aestheticising postcolonial cosmopolitanism of the twentieth century. The figure of the refugee in Australian literature and society more broadly confirms this. Refugees exist ‘insofar as she or he poses a challenge to the nation-state as presently constituted’ (Simoes da Silva 68), and this present constitution, particularly in its legal and political dimensions, coopts compassionate incitements to speak on behalf of the refugee figures as a further verification of rather than alleviation of the horrific, traumatised status that they endure. This means that compassion, rather than the lack of it, is constitutive of the state of exception because it positions all migrant and refugee narratives ‘as reductive stereotypes of survival and confrontation’ (Cahill 198). The danger here is that the activist mode of literature may be tempted to give way to a humanism that promises enlightenment and transformation, but only does so from within the extant constellation of values whose outside and borders have been policed by Australian government policy and politics. Refugee figures in Australian literature are difficult, complex intensities of affect because they present a counterintuitive instance of law and the nation-state failing those who need its protection the most. We need more narratives of asylum seekers and refugees in Australian literature, certainly, but it is of more pressing concern that we, the audiences for that literature, are already prone to think ourselves outside the administered population by realising that such a conceptual move is the price of admitting our complicity with the current state of the world.2

Notes 1 See in particular Elizabeth McMahon’s critique of the desert and island figurations of Australian national identity in Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination (2016), foreshadowed by her article ‘Encapsulated Space: The Paradise-Prison of Australia’s Island Imaginary’ (2005). 2 I would like to thank Dr Anthea Vogl from the University of Technology Sydney Law Faculty for her input and suggestions for this chapter. I would also like to recognise the members of the Law, Literature,

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Daniel Hourigan and the Humanities Association of Australasia, for their ongoing commitment to evolving the discussion of refugees and human rights, which I have found valuable for guiding the development of critical ideas in this chapter.

Works Cited Australian Human Rights Commission. Judicial Review of Lawfulness of Detention: Australian Human Rights Commission Response to Questionnaire from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Sydney, NSW: Australian Human Rights Commission, 2013. Bobis, Merlinda. Locust Girl: A Lovesong. Melbourne, VIC: Spinifex, 2015. Boochani, Behrouz. ‘A Letter from Manus Island.’ Trans. O. Tofighian. Saturday Paper 9–15 Dec. 2017. . Cahill, Michelle. ‘The Colour of Dream: Unmasking Whiteness.’ Southerly 74.2 (2014): 196–211. Commonwealth of Australia. Bills, Migration Legislation Amendment (Offshore Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2011, Second Reading (Official Hansard). . ———. Migration Legislation Amendment (Regional Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2012. . Dale, David. ‘The 50 Australians Who Matter.’ Age 22 Jan. 2005. . Davidson, Helen. ‘Offshore Detention: Australia’s Recent Immigration History a “Human Rights Catastrophe.”’ Guardian 13 Nov. 2016. . De Kretser, Michelle. Questions of Travel. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2012. Dudek, Debra. ‘Under the Wire: Detainee Activism in Australian Children’s Literature.’ Papers 16.2 (2006): 17–22. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. Goellnicht, Donald C. ‘“Ethnic Literature’s Hot”: Asian American Literature, Refugee Cosmopolitanism, and Nam Le’s The Boat.’ Journal of Asian American Studies 15.2 (2012): 197–224. Hegel, Georges Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Helff, Sissy. ‘Children in Detention: Juvenile Authors Recollect Refugee Stories.’ Papers 17.2 (2007): 67–74. Herrero, Dolores. ‘Post-Apocalypse Literature in the Age of Unrelenting Borders and Refugee Crises: Merlinda Bobis and Australian Fiction.’ Interventions 19.7 (2017): 948–961. Jacklin, Michael. ‘Detention, Displacement and Dissent in Recent Australian Life Writing.’ Life Writing 8.4 (2011): 375–385. Keneally, Tom, and Rosie Scott, ed. A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers. Sydney, NSW: Penguin, 2013. Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire livre XIX: … ou pire, 1971–72. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2011. Le, Nam. The Boat. New York: Vintage, 2009. Lokugé, Chandani. ‘Mediating Literary Borders: Sri Lankan Writing in Australia.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.5 (2016): 559–571. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges van den Abbeele. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988. Mbembe, Achille. ‘Necropolitics.’ Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. McCarthy, Birdie. ‘Identity as Radical Alterity: Critiques of Eurocentrism, Coloniality, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Australian and Latin American Poetry.’ Antipodes 24.2 (2010): 189–197. McMahon, Elizabeth. ‘Encapsulated Space: The Paradise-Prison of Australia’s Island Imaginary.’ Southerly 65.1 (2005): 20–30. ———. Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination. London: Anthem, 2016. Nabizadeh, Golnar. ‘Comics Online: Detention and White Space in “A Guard’s Story.”’ ARIEL 47.1–2 (2016): 337–357. Neumann, Klaus. ‘“Thinking the Forbidden Concept”: Refugees as Immigrants and Exiles.’ Antipodes 19.1 (2005): 6–11. Phillips, Janet. ‘The “Pacific Solution” Revisited: A Statistical Guide to the Asylum Seeker Caseloads on Nauru and Manus Island.’ Parliamentary Library. 2012. .

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Asylum Seekers and Refugees Rawi, Mahboba. Mahboba’s Promise: How One Woman Made a World of Difference. Sydney, NSW: Bantam, 2005. Simoes da Silva, Tony. ‘Displaced Selves in Contemporary Fiction, or the Art of Literary Activism.’ Australian Literary Studies 28.4 (2013): 65–78. United Nations General Assembly. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 1966. . Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010.

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27 INTO THE URBAN LABYRINTH Helen Garner and the Drug Narrative Nycole Prowse

This chapter considers the spatiotemporal specificities placed upon the body in an Australian drug text: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977). An analysis of the narcoticisation of the city in Garner’s novel will be read through Walter Benjamin’s notions of the urban space as a ‘narcotic dream’ (Watson and Gibson 73) and Elizabeth Grosz’s anatomisation of ‘uncontainability’ and corporeal ‘leakiness’ (Volatile Bodies iv). Garner’s Monkey Grip provides a site to canvas Grosz’s assertions on the implication of gender when reframing the spatiotemporal positionality of bodies. Grosz’s seminal text, Space, Time and Perversion (1995), initiated a postmodern feminist understanding of how bodies live and are positioned as spatiotemporal beings. Grosz suggests that in order to reconceive bodies, and to understand the kinds of active interrelations possible between (lived) representations of the body and (theoretical) representations of space and time, the bodies of each sex need to be accorded the possibility of a different space-time framework. (Space 100) More specifically it is the use of the narcotised urban space in Garner’s novel that will be examined for its potential to reconceptualise bodies, sexed bodies that inhabit that space. Grosz suggests: The city is one of the crucial factors in the social production of (sexed) corporeality: the built environment provides the context and coordinates for contemporary forms of body. The city provides the order and organization that automatically links otherwise unrelated bodies: it is the condition and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively produced. (104) Moreover, as Luce Irigaray observes, [t]he question of the dwelling, of where and how to live, is … a crucial one both in the production of the male domination of women’s bodies, and in women’s struggles to acquire an autonomous space they can occupy, and live in as women. (Speculum 143–144) A postmodern feminist examination of Garner’s novel reveals the processes of this discursive production, and how bodies in an urban context are cultural and patriarchal constructs.

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The relationship of drug experience and the city is a pivotal feature of drug literature. The cityscape is either the setting or incubator of many drug texts: from London (Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [1821], Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘A True Dream’ (1833), Anna Kavan’s Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories [2009]) to New York, Paris and Tangiers ( William S Burroughs’s Naked Lunch [1959]) to Shanghai (Emily Hahn’s ‘The Big Smoke’ [1950]). The crucial connection between the urban landscape and drugs – the sensory saturation of both – is summed up in the observations of the body’s ‘pliability’ and ‘stretchability.’ In Grosz’s terms, the city ‘seeps’ into the body and affects ‘all the other elements that go into the constitution of corporeality’ (Space 108–109). Importantly, however, if the city-space produces and procures ‘the body’s cultural saturation,’ the body can also be rewritten as an oppositional force: ‘the body (as cultural product) transforms, reinscribes the urban landscape according to its changing (demographic) needs, extending the limits of the city ever towards the countryside that borders it’ (108–109). Space and the body are hyperbolised in the drug experience, magnifying and enabling a sense of interconnectivity, diversity and difference. The reinscription of the oppositional force of the body and the landscape in drug literature is facilitated and intensified by the distortions of space and time produced by urban modernity, best illuminated through Benjamin’s phantasmagoric, narcotic dreaming of the modern city. This abiding concern of drug literature explicitly informs Garner’s work. The refabulised literary city-space is a site for the formulation of questions, exposing the displacement of the subject. It can also be a site to find answers: a place of corporeal alternatives – emplacing the subject. If the city is, as Grosz suggests, ‘the most immediate locus for the production and circulation of power’ (109), the narco-literary city can be seen as a site to reproduce bodies, to refabulise the subject: the subject becomes a space or place in itself. The representation of urban space and drug troping in Garner’s novel will be explored with an eye to the permeability of both the subject and the space along the lines of a Spinozan-Kantian division. Time is also relative, distorted and ambivalent in the drugged urban spaces of Monkey Grip, again suggesting the pertinence of Grosz’s theorisations of modern subjectivity. For Grosz, ‘time cannot be viewed directly’: Time is not merely the attribute of a subject, imposed by us on the world: it is a condition of what is living, of matter, of the real, of the universe itself. It is what the universe imposes on us rather than we on it; it is what we find ourselves immersed in, given, as impinging and as enabling as our spatiality. (The Nick of Time 4–5) The subject-body is at time’s disposal, so Grosz suggests that time is ‘perhaps the most enigmatic, the most paradoxical, elusive, and ‘unreal’ of any form of material existence’ (4). The ontological possibilities of reclaiming time as continual becoming are embedded in drug literature. In drug literature the subject is ‘ jarred out of our immersion in its continuity, when something untimely disrupts our expectations’ (5), triggering reflections about the conventional measurements and expectations of time; and provoking a hyperaware rethink, or analysis, of the regulatory, enigmatic regime of time itself. In this connection, drug writing is inherently temporally subversive. Drug writing decentres the human subject’s belonging to time. It is the drugged ‘exploration of those nicks, disruptions or upheavals – events that disrupt our immersion in and provoke our conceptualisation of temporal continuity’ (5), where political engagements and refusals can take shape. The reconceptualised, narcotic-dreamed spaces and times of Monkey Grip also exemplify a carnivalesque inversion. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explain the carnivalesque project as a re-positioning of the ‘perverse,’ the ‘scatological’ and the ‘low,’ to ‘expose the hidden truth’ about society (20). Bakhtin’s carnival – a ‘world inside out’ (Bakhtin 11) – has immediate resonances in Australian drug literature: a perverse sense of self seen

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from the periphery of the symbolic order, the destabilisation of notions of subjectivity and the inversion of spatial and temporal power structures. At its narrative base, Monkey Grip is a conventional love story re-set in an underworld. The novel offers the famous equation: ‘Smack habit, love habit – what’s the difference?’ Kerryn Goldsworthy identifies this as part of a familiar concern, ‘the relationship between sexual behaviour and social organisation; the anarchic nature of desire and the orderly face of the institution of “family”’ (28) – inflected and situated differently but not alien: Jane Austen laced with sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and hippy-feminism. Subject to mixed reviews when it first appeared in 1977, Monkey Grip was soon critically embraced as something of a landmark. In the decade before Monkey Grip, there had been acclaimed drug texts by Australian writers, such as poet Michael Dransfield’s heroin verse in Streets of the Long Voyage (1970) and Drug Poems (1972), and to a lesser extent the still-underrated narco-memoir Cure: Recollections of an Addict (1971) by Kevin Mackey. Garner’s novel caused a sensation because it had something else: it was about drugs, it depicted an alternative lifestyle and it was by a woman. Another, more significant inversion should be noted at this point. If Monkey Grip depicts a narco-world that is ‘down and out,’ it is also set ‘down under,’ in the narcotically dreamed cityscape of Melbourne. It replants the mainline drug tradition in the antipodes – an antipodean rendering of drug writing. As Pablo Armellino’s analysis of the ‘ob-scene’ spaces in Australian narrative suggests, Australia’s situation as a region ‘down under’ is a result of the ‘bourgeois unconscious’ historically displaced in an ‘ob-scene’ setting: ‘being at the antipodes of the globe and with an apparently bare and void landscape’ (195). Australia’s geographical and temporal global positioning – its ‘down-underness’ – also impacts upon the subject-body. According to Graeme Turner, literary representations of the Australian identity evoke a sense of the self as imprisoned, exiled and divorced, and ‘as such, they seem suggestive and productive metaphors for Australian existence’ (84). The use of landscape in early Australian fiction, and in particular the mythologising of the Australian bush, created an Australian identity based upon this sense of loss, alienation and isolation: and seeing ‘the Australian context in terms of a hostile and intransigent nature [allowed] social discontent to be displaced, to be projected onto a set of conditions in which the individual is “naturally” impotent’ (35). In Turner’s schema, however, this impotence is answered in more recent Australian fictions that challenge the notion of colonial displacement: A distinction needs to be made between the fiction that looks back at what is generally seen as the necessity for exile, usually in the period up to the mid 1970s, and more recent fiction that often rejects this earlier attitude, seen as part of the ‘cultural cringe’. (84) As a novel post this mid-1970s moment, Garner’s Monkey Grip refuses older, conservative conceptualisations of an Australian national identity and supplies a contemporary, alternative ‘being in place’ which is decisively linked to ‘being-on-drugs.’ Monkey Grip was a part of the successful independent Australian publishing enterprise that extended across two decades, from the early-mid 1970s to the early-mid 1990s, embracing alternative and transgressive portrayals of what it was to be Australian (McPhee qtd in Gelder and Salzman 1). In particular, the latter part of this independent publishing boom was marked by the appearance of an Australian-accented grunge writing or dirty realism. Regardless of debates about the literary-critical terms, this genre was an injection of new perspectives, a ‘shot in the arm’ for Australian writing. And given Garner’s precedence here, in an Australian literary context, it does not seem out of order to claim her as an ancestral figure: if Burroughs is the ‘Godfather of the Beats’ (Copetas), Garner might be the ‘Godmother of Australian Grunge.’ Although Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman suggest that ‘the kinds of transgression evoked by grunge fiction can be traced back as far as Rabelais and the carnivalesque mode analysed by Bakhtin [as a] pre-history of grunge fiction’s abject leaking, farting, shitting, vomiting, 264

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copulating body,’ they admit that ‘the comparative excesses of its youthful characters … might still shock’ (205). Indeed, Kirsty Leishman takes up this point, commenting on the grunge or dirty-realist depiction of decayed urban spaces and the ‘disenfranchised young people who lived there; gritty, dirty, real existences, eked out in a world of disintegrating futures where the only relief from ever-present boredom was through a nihilistic pursuit of sex, violence, drugs and alcohol’ (94). While grunge, or dirty realism, is a youthful, postmodern manifestation of an older Rabelaisian tradition, it most certainly also defers to the ‘warts and all’ authenticity claims of drug literature. Garner’s Monkey Grip is sometimes categorised as grunge fiction because of its carnivalesque over-turnings, but it is indisputably narco-life-writing. As Susan Lever notes, ‘Garner based her novel on her diary, circulating the manuscript before publication among the friends who might recognise themselves in it’ (106), and has frequently admitted, or asserted, Monkey Grip’s foundation in ‘real’ fact. The interconnectivity of space-time and the body (how space-time impacts the body and how the body impacts space), and the significance of the analysis of this interconnectivity are exemplified in life writing. Consequently, the realist but somewhat narco-hallucinatory mode of Garner’s life writing suggests what Turner calls a radical ‘depiction of non-consensual views of life … a critical analysis of Australian society [a] formal break from realism [that carries] with it the potential for dislodging … both the narrative and the world that it represents’ (133–134). Even Gelder and Salzman make a similar concession: ‘the modern urban setting of the grunge novel’ shocks Australian writing (205), collapsing the private and public, offering fluid representations of once-regulated spaces and dislodging regulatory notions of subjectivity. But as Grosz argues in Space, Time and Perversion, this dislodging is always gendered: in order to reconceive bodies, and to understand the kinds of active interrelations possible between (lived) representations of the body and (theoretical) representations of space and time, the bodies of each sex need to be accorded the possibility of a different space-time framework. (100) In an Australian literary context, the different space-time framework in which women have largely written is from a margin. In Women and the Bush, a landmark work in charting the positionality of female writers in the male-dominated, bush-biased and national character-creating ‘tradition,’ Kay Schaffer considers Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902) as: ‘subversive textuality … function[ing] to deconstruct the “place” of women in the (male) imaginary … by pointing to it from the stance of a dissident, speaking to a tradition from its dangerous margins’ (168). Schaffer’s comments take their cue from Julia Kristeva’s proposition that it is this positionality that makes women dangerous ‘dissident[s] … here to shake up, to disturb, to deflate masculine values, and not to espouse them’ (148). Peripheral female subjects become politically motivated subject-bodies, empowered by their edginess. Garner’s Monkey Grip comes from the dangerous peripheries, a site of feminist political engagement. Garner’s use of the drug trope is thus suggestive of the way in which the female subject belongs to space, is emplaced in temporal and spatial surrounds. This is evidenced in the way Garner uses the drug trope to re-envision time and space from a female corporeal position in Monkey Grip. Margaret Henderson and Shane Rowlands consider that the ‘writing-from-the-edge’ in Monkey Grip articulates ‘a deep sense of political engagement’ – something they deem missing from the grunge of the 1990s. They argue that texts like Monkey Grip ‘represent moments of radical history, when alternative lifestyles were ideological positions rather than consumerist (or fashion) statements’ (qtd in Leishman 97). In Garner’s novel ‘beingon-drugs’ has an organically engaged and politically positive orientation – a political mobility or hope for social transformation. In Monkey Grip’s historical moment, the 1970s, it still seemed possible to renegotiate the meaning of drugs. 265

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Many things were happening in the late 1970s in the Australian cultural, literary and social landscape that are relevant to, and structure, the political overtones of Monkey Grip and its subversive possibilities. Bruce Bennett suggests it was a decade when ‘conceptions of Australia as a symbolic emptiness gave way to local specificity and regional awareness; to forms of internationalism, too; and to a sense of cultural plenitude or at least cultural potential.’ The 1970s was a period when Australian literary criticism ‘came to invest much more in contemporary writing … and as a social fact as much as an artistic movement.’ Thus, in Bennett’s estimation, Garner’s Monkey Grip was seen to ‘represent a newly autonomous, original and self-originating culture no longer defined by its colonial inheritance’ (qtd in Pierce 378). Consequently, the hedonism that Gelder and Salzman see in the ‘vibrant shared houses celebrated’ in Monkey Grip offers a small utopian promise of new and independent subjectivities (262). As Garner’s protagonist Nora recalls: ‘we all thrashed about swapping and changing partners – like a very complicated dance to which the steps had not yet been choreographed, all of us trying to move gracefully in spite of our ignorance’ (192). This sense of experimentation, of tentatively yet openly dancing (or ‘thrashing’) towards something new, thematically governs Monkey Grip. This is a passage that encapsulates the novel’s exploration of fluid identities, affirmed from the margins of traditions and institutions (Bennett’s ‘colonial inheritance’) and grounded in selforiginating, contemporary female experience. Consequently, Gelder and Salzman view Australian texts like Monkey Grip as fundamentally utopian: a ‘fruitful interaction between politics and fiction, realism and narrative experimentation, characteristic of that earlier period of social ferment’ (262). Lever concurs: ‘In Monkey Grip, Nora sees sexual transcendence and romance in what others might see as the sordid routines of drug addiction and promiscuous sex’ (112). This romantic transcendence is heightened in the specific connection of Nora and her heroin-addict lover Javo: Whenever he touched my cunt, my clitoris seemed to be in the exact spot where he first came in contact with my flesh: I was ready for him before we started, as if hastening all my processes to be there for him. I took his cock and put it inside me, and looked down at his wrecked and beautiful face, how it melted and turned gentle and even the blue eyes blurred, up that close. I seemed to start coming almost immediately; he saw it and smiled with joy, and we came together effortlessly, smiling and smiling into each other’s faces. We lay together without speaking for a little while, half-laughing with happiness and astonishment. (Garner 210) Importantly, however, this impulse towards romantic-sexual transcendence is never impulsive or innocent. If romantic sexuality empowers the female-subject body, making it active responsive, this is not reduced or idealised as a simple escape from convention. As Lever points out, the novel’s romantic representations of sexual bliss are juxtaposed with ‘deflating revelations of its realistic underside’ (111). Immediately after Javo and Nora’s sexual union, she observes her junky lover: As I watched a paroxysm of vomiting caught him unawares: he was lying on his back and a few drops of the watery yellow vomit flew into the air and splashed on to my cheek. I turned him over so he hung over the bucket and he spewed weakly. (Garner 211) If the novel’s drug world offers the possibility of newly negotiated identities, it also involves a view of drugs – and heroin specifically – as the catalyst for a very visceral unbecoming, whereby the subject-body is neither elevated nor released. Significantly, while Garner’s female protagonist is, in sociomedical terminology, a frequent polydrug user – amphetamines, cocaine, acid, marijuana, alcohol – she does not use heroin herself. In this way, the drug trope in Garner’s novel is highly nuanced. While the drug experience is linked 266

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to distorting inscriptions – of space, time and so on – on the user-body, Monkey Grip is also realistically attuned to fine distinctions between various types of drug experience. It has the authenticity claim of an insider who can discriminate and unravel the conventional, socially and conceptually universalised category ‘drugs.’ And there is an almost ethnographic dimension, a kind of field work, in Garner’s portrayal of the heroin scene – a masculine space, structured by rituals and codes: It was a pleasant charade we all played out, me and the junkies, either to spare what they saw as my delicate sensibilities, or to be genuinely courteous: a social code with a sub-text that they meant me to grasp intuitively. (80) Even so, this ritual world of pleasant charades is somewhat naturalised. Though Nora does not experience heroin in a firsthand material sense, the permeation of the drug into the novel’s sociocultural space – and her sense of self – is reflected in Monkey Grip’s language and metaphors, a poesis, suggesting a Spinozan interconnection of heroin, the self and the order of Nature, with ‘junk oozing in the atmosphere’ (79). The ‘smack-habit love habit’ in Monkey Grip retains a forward propulsion, perhaps because of Nora’s critiquing of the heroine through Javo, and suggests the gradual actualisation of the female subject. Nora uses different drugs for different purposes, signifying a sense of control and choice. The heterogeneity of her drug use also parallels the multiplicity and potential of the postmodern subject – a subject that is always becoming, rather than stagnating. Unlike the alienated male protagonist of Davies’ novel, Nora does not have a fear of isolation: ‘I was tripping again by myself ’ (208), so Nora’s solitary drug taking is an affirmation of autonomy and empowerment. Nora creates a space, a drugged space, where she can fill herself; rebalance and replenish the self, not empty it of significations. Nora’s body is a self-described ‘reservoir’ (146) – not the abject male found in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch or Luke Davies’s Candy (1997). And Nora-Garner comes to epitomise Grosz’s temporal re-spatialisation of the postmodern subject. She is a literary reflection of Grosz’s view of time as having ‘a life of its own, time deviates, splits, divides itself … it is we who are in time, rather than time that is in us; it is time which inhabits us, subsists or inheres within and beyond us’ (Time Travels 3). In one episode in Monkey Grip, Nora describes temporal instabilities and the intensities of discourse and insight they afford. Freed from time, the ultimate of everyday constructs, Nora can move along on fresh subjective currents: I spent another coke night, almost till dawn, in my bed with Bill. We talked about things I had never talked about before: what it means to be alive in 1975, what change is and might be, how we see ourselves fitting in (or not) to this society, what the next step is or might be. We talked about these desolate things … the dawn came and we got up and attended to the children. (Garner 147–148) And just as cocaine collapses night and day, so Monkey Grip also collapses the boundaries which stereotype the female subject: in this episode, conventional perceptions of the monstrous, drug-using mother as neglectful and inattentive to her children’s needs. As Barbara Denton writes in Dealing: Women in the Drug Economy (2001), the trend is to view drug-using mothers ‘in only the most negative terms,’ as on the margin of a margin of a margin as it were, pathological and deviant in the extreme (166). And from Grosz’s theoretical perspective (The Nick of Time 4), Garner’s reframing of time also radically redefines the possibilities of the subject-body; the ‘ontology of time’ leads to the view of subject-bodies that are continuously overcoming and becoming. This is a factor of Monkey Grip’s more general upside-down character. If the Antipodes are a cultural downside of European culture, prompting ossified versions of the national psyche as 267

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exiled or alienated – as critics like Armellino and Turner propose – then Garner answers this with a very different, feminist inquiry into ‘what it means to be alive in 1975,’ in a changing contemporary urban landscape. Alongside motherhood, the novel examines institutions such as romantic interpersonal relationships (marriage, implicitly), community and ‘home.’ The novel’s drugged odyssey begins and ends with the invocation of home: In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives … Oh, I was happy then. At night our back yard smelt like the country. (Garner 1) The ‘we’ here is not a conventional family, but an inner-urban commune, and the cityscape incorporates the country – again scenically collapsing a binary, ‘the City or the Bush,’ which A rmellino says ‘has been shaped during the entire course of Australian literary history’ and involves the construction of city and country as ‘either a utopian or a dystopic space’ (189). Monkey Grip is continually paced by the rhythms of a country-nature transplanted in the inner city: excursions into the bush, sojourns on the beach, solstices and the turning of seasons. Near the novel’s outset, Nora gathers her daughter Gracie and some friends for a trip to the symbolically imbued ‘real’ place of Disaster Bay, which is just near the real-symbolic coastal town of Eden: a space where the elements embattle her – ‘my face was burnt almost back to paleness and my eyes stared out of dirty skin’ – but ‘I liked myself: I looked strong and healthy’ (Garner 3). Initially, this reads as an escape from her first seasonal encounter with the heroin addict Javo, who is himself initially characterised as, almost, a sun-marked bushman: It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have somebody to love. There was Martin, teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack … But he went up north for a fortnight and idly, at the turning of the year, I fell in love with our friend Javo … just back from getting off dope … I looked at his burnt skin and scarred nose and violently blue eyes. (1) Javo is reconfigured here, in a Spinozan sense, as part of a natural landscape, of burnt earth and violent skies. As Grosz says, it is as if the body ‘reinscribes the urban landscape’ according to specific and changing needs, extending ‘the limits of the city ever towards the countryside that borders it’ (Space 109) – or, in Monkey Grip, transplanting the country in metropolitan space. Throughout Garner’s novel, the project of female becoming is encapsulated in natural symbolism: I was balancing myself out nicely, there, in the quietness … it had no edge or sharpness. It was merely a series of blurred, dull facts. Whenever I woke from dozing, I found the sky as grey, the surf noise as steady, the house as peaceful as they had been when I lay down hours before. I had no idea what the others were doing, nor what time it was. (Garner 242) Space-time’s hallucinatory ‘blurred … facts’ are, paradoxically, an acknowledgement of and confrontation with natural and very real processes; the engagement with space-time in a Groszian sense as ‘life succumb[ing] to its rhythms, direction, and forces, to the ever pressing forces of development, growth, and decay’ (The Nick of Time 5). In this regard, Monkey Grip’s ‘being-ondrugs’ attempts to establish a fresh and feminist response to the spatiotemporal question of what it means to be a woman, alive in Australia ‘in 1975,’ giving the woman-mother and subject-body a

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degree of agency over apparently implacable forces. As Gelder and Salzman observe, the corrupting city of Australian literary tradition is refabulised and the ‘inner-urban Melbourne community of musicians, actors, teachers and drop-outs is presented in loving detail [celebrating] everything from the Fitzroy baths to the theatrical activity of Carlton’ (103). And returning to Benjamin’s re-imaginings of urban space as ‘narcotic dream – a “phantasmagoria,” the dream world of the urban spectacle,’ Garner’s Melbourne presents a defiant redefinition of space that talks back to Australian literary tradition. Garner’s real-but-hallucinated Melbourne, her city of dreams, foregrounds the collapsing dichotomies of city-country, centre-frontier, as urban space is remapped by the recurrent images of pastoral: an arcadian zone of gardens, fruit trees and teeming natural life, where the hard manmade edges of the city are mellowed or softened: We bumped over the gutter and on to the softening bitumen. The kids begin to sing. We roll in unison … down the wide road and into the green tunnel, the cave of the Edinburgh Gardens … The hoses flick silver strings on to the drying grass. The cicadas beat a rhythm that comes in waves, like fainting or your own heartbeat … We sweep round the corner into the Belgium Lane, where the air is peppery with the scent of cut timber and even on this still day the poplars flutter over the ancient grey picket fence; they thrust up their sprouts through the cracking asphalt under our wheels… ‘No-one will ever understand,’ I say … ‘but this is paradise.’ (Garner 10) This voluptuous pastoral vision has a hallucinatory quality – urban realism drifting into dreamscape – in step with Benjamin’s theorisation of the modern cityscape as phantasmagorical, or a space of ‘newness and freedom’ (Wright qtd in Turner 25). The real-dream city Melbourne, in 1975, is a space-time where Garner can interrogate order and make a claim to agency. The collapse of nature into culture persists, in the dreams and visions which begin to blur the outer and inner worlds. Nora finds herself in a border zone which is not without confusions and terrors, as narco-dreams leak into her everyday consciousness: The fantasies were out of control. They were indescribably delightful. The most trivial word or image would trigger off a bout of them. And every time, when I could no longer ignore their total lack of connection with, or meaning in, the real world, the bad moments followed, as reliably as the thump at the end of a coke flash. (Garner 136; my emphasis) Monkey Grip’s apparent urban realism is progressively infiltrated by passages of fantasy, hallucination and dream: ‘I looked in the mirror, I saw a preoccupied face, a worried head, a body out of sync with the mind … disconnected fragments tumbled about’ (242). Nora sinks into ‘a stream of thoughts’ about Javo, ‘which ran for the most part below conscious level. I noticed jets spurting up from this stream: comparisons with other relationships I know of which had weathered massive changes and shifts of balance’ (242–243). But the transient disturbances of drugged dreamscapes and hallucinations soon pass. The fantasy zone Nora inhabits is actually the symbolic site where the subject-body ‘reinscribes the urban’ and its needs are fulfilled; the site where city limits and expansive countryside meet: I dreamed again and again of houses, always big airy open houses, always beside the sea, wind flowing freely through the rooms, people pleasantly disposed or working quietly, and miles and miles of ocean out every window. In such a house of dreams … I woke up and my room was full of sunny wind, red curtain flying and the noise of the market battering away out there past the Ah Chang Trading Company. (137–138)

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In Grosz’s terms, the city ‘seeps’ into the ‘pliable’ body consciousness, affecting its elements, producing a female subject-body that is organically replenished and resolved (Space 108). The rush of the drug experience is analogised to moments of self-affirming convalescent sublimity: In the morning, light and air wake me. I go outside and see a sky a thousand miles high, covered with a fine net of almost invisible cloud. My head begins to turn, it fills with unspoken words, I don’t try to seize them but let them run unchecked. They seem to slip into my veins and my limbs and the capillaries of my skin. It is just convalescence, and the summer morning. ‘The universe resounds with the joyful cry “I am!”’ (Garner 171) This is a brief, drug-saturated rapture, where the subject-body is imagined in limitless, almost cosmic space. It is an inversion, or subversion of the Kantian ‘I am,’ where the ‘spaced-out’ subject is replaced in the grand order of the universal natural – a declarative feminist appropriation. The image of a resounding universe (a quotation from Alexander Scriabin’s ‘Poem of Ecstasy’ [1905–1908]), the unified inner-outer spaces, comes close to an articulation of Hélène Cixous’s hopes for l’écriture feminine: moments of an unbounded writing from the body, a writing that depicts a female psyche freed from spatial and temporal constraint. As Gelder and Salzman say of Garner’s style, her writing is characteristically concerned with the depiction of a feminine consciousness conveyed through a specific female style. That style may have been far from the wilder reaches of écriture feminine, but it was (and remains) the most impressive aspect of Garner’s writing … and is always attuned to the luminous nuances of the details of everyday life. (180) Throughout Monkey Grip, luminous moments break through the text’s grunge or dirty realism. These might be understood through Watson and Gibson’s hyper-realism, of the phantasmagoric ‘dream world of the urban spectacle’ becoming the habitation of a female subject-body which re-inscribes space and time to its own ‘needs’ (73). But this reinscription is always located in the ‘known’ world of inner-urban Melbourne, ‘everyday life.’ As Grosz suggests, for women to … occupy another space, or to … occupy this space differently women need to return to those places from which they have been dis-or re-placed or expelled … in order to be able to experiment with and produce the possibility of occupying, dwelling or living in new spaces, which in their turn help generate new perspectives, new bodies, new ways of inhabiting. (Space 124) The transcendence of Garner’s novel appears through the cracks of ‘real’ urban space and time, drug-dreaming a new world into being from the peripheries. Gelder and Salzman observe that Garner’s literary project pivots on ‘the attempt to capture certain areas of female experience … that stretches the form of fiction away from certain conventions seen as patriarchal’ (55). Lever agrees: ‘Despite [the] recurring documentary aspect of her fiction, Garner always seems to be reaching for another level of experience beyond the mundane level of external appearances. Garner writes fiction to find more than the apparent reality, not to reduce it. (112)

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Garner’s Melbourne is a space where the everyday is reenchanted, in an attempt to ‘find more’ in both the distributive city-space and the female drug-using subject. This is, as Gelder and Saltzman argue, an identifiably feminist shift from straight realism, but not a total disruption. In many ways, the drug experience intensifies the sense of everydayness as a space in which difference and autonomy can be negotiated: My own modest crumbs of coke I hoarded for solitary moments. I crept upstairs with the mirror and the razor and the rolled-up banknote and snorted it secretly in the stuffy little attic room where the children kept their toys. Up I flew. Wasn’t it already the shortest day of the year? Winter solstice … I sailed off to the film festival, chilled in the hands but full of warmth for the human race and all material things. (Garner 77) The uplifted recognition of not only human but ‘all material things’ prefigures the novel’s end. The city and the natural world are reenchanted throughout Nora’s narrative of becoming – a narrative which begins and ends with the invocation of home. But this circular journey, an odyssey of love and drugs, is not a resigned return to domestic comfort – it is the narrative of a female self, energised and actualised, performing Grosz’s reoccupation of space. Nora has negotiated the love affair with junky Javo, navigated the ‘terrible trick of dope’ and its kingdom, and ‘swayed dizzily on its borders’ with him, ‘each in our own ecstasy’ (71). But she has survived, enriched and independent, and can finally speak about him and the doomed affair ‘comfortably… I laughed wholeheartedly about it for the first time’ (71). This celebratory, liberating moment is set in an enchanted landscape: In the middle of the night I woke up and went outside to piss on the grass. The moon hung low in the sky above the quiet hedge. I squatted down at the corner of the house and let my piss run down the bare, grey earth in a trickle. I stood up, wiped myself with my hand … I stood still, staring at the moon and feeling the soft air on my skin … ‘Well … so be it. Let it be what it is.’ In the morning the sky was clear, the sunlight lay on the scrubby grass in long, pinkish-gold strips. The absent-minded carolling of magpies dropped out of the pine trees half a mile away. Time to go home. (244–245) Garner rewrites both the city and the bush as hallucinatory landscapes, collapsing the dichotomy that has historically framed – and disabled – conceptions of the Australian literary heritage. In Monkey Grip, both zones are reoccupied by the drug-inspired female imagination and body: a body which is newly inhabited and comfortable at last with its own potential lowness or abjection – pissing in the grass, wiping itself with its hand, illuminated under the symbolic moon. This is what Barbara Brooks sees as the Australian female writer’s ‘desire to live on the edge, to be always confronting, breaking out. In our maps, we live on the edge, but our concerns are central’ (39). The skewed view from the periphery that is inflected through the drug experience in Monkey Grip provocatively portrays the power of writing from the margins. Dangerous ideas evoked by the drug trope are pushed to the centre, subverting and fragmenting from the edge, but paradoxically enabling female agency from the cultural centre. Monkey Grip’s narcoticised urban space also seeps into Garner’s pastoralisation of the mothering experience, presenting a type of mothering that equally softens the city, a mothering that is protective yet free from normative maternal constraints that are emblematic of patriarchal force. I woke in the morning and heard at the same moment a rooster crow in the back yard and a clock strike in a house in Woodhead Street. I walked through our house … In the rooms

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people slept singly in double beds, nothing over them but a sheet, brown faces on still pillows. Gracie and Eve’s boy the Roaster sprawled in their bunks. A glass fish tinked at their window. I put the kettle on to make the coffee, stared out the louvres of the kitchen window at the rough grass and the sky already hot blue. (Garner 2) The city and the drug world are not dangerous places for children in Monkey Grip. Evoking a Spinozan sense of interconnectivity with space, the text continually depicts a childhood that is wholesome, fecund, organic and natural. As Nora rides to the swimming pool with Gracie in her bike carrier even the harsh surfaces of the city acquiesce to dreamy narcoticisation, the ‘softening bitumen’ of summer (9). The pool is also reflective of mothering: womblike, a watery oasis of any city and vital pastoral resource in Garner’s sweltering summer of smack. Nora makes the following observation as she enters the pool: Gracie holds my hand with her hard brown one and we pick our way between the baking bodies to the shallow pool. The brightness of that expanse of concrete is atomic: eyes close up involuntarily, skin flinches. I lower myself gingerly on to the blazing ground and watch the kids approach the pool. The Roaster slips over the side and wades inexorably deeper; Gracie waves to me and squints, wraps her wiry arms around her belly, and sinks like a rich American lady beneath the chemicals … I pull my hat over my eyes and settle down on my elbows to the day’s vigilance. (10) This is not a vision of the self-indulgent, drug-using mother stereotypically represented in addiction discourse – Nora is instead, ‘vigilant.’ And although mother and daughter are chemically bonded (Nora on drugs, Gracie ‘like a rich American lady beneath the chemicals’ of the swimming pool), they retain their autonomy and agency. This is evidenced in the symbiotic, natural relation underlined by the shared but independent agency of mother and daughter when Gracie begins school: Gracie, having hung longingly over the state school fence for three days, at last became a schoolgirl. She carried a small cardboard case down the street every morning, and returned dragging her steps every afternoon … her teacher discovered Gracie’s problem: boredom, caused by the fact that she was the only child in her grade who could read. I spent hours with her after school, drawing endless faces in profile, cartoons about the people in our household, rising suns, earthquakes, cyclones. If I had to deliver her up to her jailers every day, I would make up for it somehow. She survived. (31) Gracie is creative and self-sufficient, and far from the stereotype of the abused child associated with the drug addict mother. Gracie’s world of make-believe parallels her mother’s hallucinatory revisioning of the urban landscape, where there is ‘plenty of good dope around’ and the ‘sun shone every day. I rode my bike everywhere … speeding along, Gracie on the back of my bike like a quiet monkey’ (37). Garner’s drug-vision Melbourne is a childlike, magical space of moons, stars, summer, cool water and autumnal serenity. Mother and child are happy free agents in this idyllic space. A gendered reading of the distinctive representations of the female drug user in Garner’s novel corresponds with its broader ontological outcomes. Garner’s Spinozan sense of belonging draws the body into a naturalised narcotic space where there is potential and possibility. The representation of the drugged female subject in Garner’s Monkey Grip is a celebration of the exhilarations and freedoms of both drugs and urban space. Garner’s novel uses the drug trope to reconceptualise the spatiotemporal boundaries that normally confine women, and then to create new meanings. 272

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Garner asserts an empowering sense of disorientation; a drugged reorientation of the subject that is enabling – power from the peripheries.

Works Cited Armellino, Pablo. Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative: An Account of the Socio-topographic Construction of Space in Australian Literature. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2009. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Hashish in Marseilles.’ 1928. Trans. Scott J Thompson. Protocol IV. Nd. . Cixous, Hélène. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ 1975. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997: 347–362. Copetas, Craig. ‘Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman.’ Rolling Stone 28 Feb. 1974. . Denton, Barbara. Dealing: Women in the Drug Economy. Sydney: UNSW P, 2001. Garner, Helen. Monkey Grip. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin Books, 1978. Gelder, Ken, and Paul Salzman. The New Diversity: Australian Fiction, 1970–88. Melbourne, VIC: McPhee Gribble, 1989. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. Helen Garner. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1994. ———. Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995. ———. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2004. ———. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2005. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985. Kristeva, Julia. Polylogue. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977. Leishman, Kirsty. ‘Australian Grunge Literature and the Conflict between Literary Generations.’ Journal of Australian Studies 23.63 (1999): 94–102. Lever, Susan. Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction. Sydney, NSW: Halstead, 2000. Pierce, Peter, ed. The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Schaffer, Kay. Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Spinoza, Baruch de. The Theologico-Political Treatise. 1677. Trans. R.H.M. Elwes. London: Forgotten, 2008. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986. Turner, Graeme. National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1986. Watson, Sophie, and Katherine Gibson, ed. Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

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28 ‘SOMETHING NEW AT HAND’ Australian Literature and the Sacred Lyn McCredden

In early 2019, several Victorian state members of parliament called for a removal of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ from parliament’s daily commencement rituals. In the name of a secular and multicultural society, these MPs called for a replacement of the prayer with either silence or a rotation of prayers from different faiths represented in Australian society. At the same time, several members of the parliament had been refusing to stand for the Indigenous ‘Acknowledgement of Country.’ Australian culture, as in many other Western nations, is in the grip of great changes, asking what the past means, who is responsible for past acts of violence and brutality, and how a vision of justice might emerge among us, whether politically, legally, or spiritually.1 Such questions are also gripping many literary and literary critical works. In Contemporary Australian Literature (2015), Nicholas Birns constructs a vision of ‘concern’ as it informs literary works. Under Birns’s umbrella of ‘concern,’ along with political and social justice, he places ‘the sacred.’ In a section entitled ‘Concern between Secular and Sacred,’ Birns opens up a global debate about the sacred and the secular with distinctively Australian nuances, as he delineates what he calls ‘transcendental’ and secular approaches in literatures of concern: concern has its rough equivalent in what … [has] been termed ‘the contemporary sacred’: a sense that braids spiritual awareness with a radical reaching out to the other’… If, as Elaine Lindsay has argued, scholars have assumed that Australia is ‘embarrassed by discussion of religious and spiritual views,’ is this silence somehow equivalent to the relative silence about Indigenous issues in mainstream Australian fiction before Mabo? (145) Birns conjures a fruitful and fraught space in Australian literary and cultural studies here as he conjoins issues of sacredness and indigeneity. Arguably, this conjunction is a little conflationary, as many Australians – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – would most probably not agree with Indigeneity and sacredness being collapsed together. But Birns is alive to this problem, as he goes on to address his central focus on concern in literature, literary criticism and issues of indigeneity in relation to secular (social justice, human rights, material) approaches, as well as to the sacred. This chapter will seek to go further in problematising the relationship between the two categories of sacred and secular as they emerge in Australian literary criticism. It will argue that one issue in Australian culture is core to future individual and communal health. This issue arises when we ask what it might mean in the wider conversations around Australia’s history and future self-understandings that many Indigenous people (though certainly not all) do work and live with

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concepts of sacredness; while at the same time many non-Indigenous Australians seem unable, or unwilling, to address this challenging category of sacredness, let alone the multiplicity of beliefs and sacred practices existing in Australia today. While Australia is often simply designated secular (as if ‘Australia’ could be one, monolithic entity), this description neglects the diverse and increasingly influential aspects of Indigenous sacred practices and beliefs, as much as it is an awkward shying away from the many religious or spiritually searching writings of Indigenous, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and other traditions, which Australia has produced across the last century (see Tacey). The following list of authors merely dips cautiously into this debate, but it represents a preliminary exploration into what might be called literatures of sacredness in Australia. Indigenous writers, Ngarrindjeri man David Unaipon and Noonuccal woman Oodgeroo, were both influenced by Indigenous and Christian belief systems. James McAuley, Les Murray, Vincent Buckley, Peter Steele, Kevin Hart, and Thea Astley all wrote in close, sometimes antagonistic, relationship to Catholicism. Patrick White and Tim Winton relate to Christian Protestant traditions. Robert Gray and Judith Beveridge were deeply influenced by Buddhist traditions; and Fay Zwicky identified herself as an outsider in Australian culture, having ‘a fair idea that it has got something to do with being born Jewish’ (Smith, ‘Becoming Fay Zwicky’). The newly emerging works of poets and novelists such as Samuel Wagan Watson, Lachlan Brown, Toby Davidson, and Lia Hills are all informed differently by religious inheritances. These writers speak from many different places and traditions in relation to the institutions and practices of religion, but all are inflected with spiritual and sacred understandings and struggles, sometimes contra those institutions, sometimes from deeply within them. Let us now examine some of the writers, critical and literary, who have found their literary life and work in the midst of sacred concerns. Australian critic Vincent Buckley’s critical volume Poetry and the Sacred (1968) as well as his poetic works are inscribed with complex material and sacred interconnections. In the poem ‘Ghosts, Places, Stories, Questions,’ from Golden Builders and Other Poem (1976), we read: … When the bush burns to ashes I still must touch my forehead to the ground, because its radiance is in my body. Gods are vulgar. So are journeys. Ulysses sails to find a speck of blood in the newly woven pattern; Orpheus goes down to find mortality a blessing. I walk beside these fires because I must, in pain and trembling sometimes thanking God for what they give me, the few poems that are the holy spaces of my life. (Collected Poems 124–125; lines 55–65)

From the very human – and possibly divine – ashes of ‘pain and trembling’ the speaker finds something like grace, a blessing in mortality, the ability, ‘sometimes’ to thank God. Or does he? The speaker here is never far from dismissing the holy, but attempts, in the middle of mortal, bodily realities, to acknowledge meaning, even if ambivalent about whether it comes from God or himself. ‘Gods are vulgar,’ after all, but so is the poet, so is literature. There are only ‘the few poems’ which rise up, and he walks ‘beside these fires because I must.’ It is still, arguably, a very human ego acknowledging the power outside itself – ‘because I must.’ Is it humility and acknowledgement of the holy we read here, or do we encounter an ego feeling forced to obey: ‘I still must touch my forehead to the ground / because its radiance is in my body.’ Sacred understanding here is hard won, flinty, ambivalently emerging from the human body, and from literary labour.

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In contrast, the poetry of controversial figure, Les Murray, is more forthright, even doctrinal at times. One of Murray’s most provocative poems is entitled ‘Poetry and Religion’ (1983). It is full of statements, almost credos: Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture into the only whole thinking: poetry … and God is the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror that he attracted, being in the world as poetry is in the poem, a law against its closure. There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent, as the action of those birds – crested pigeon, rosella parrot – who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut. (Collected Poems 269; lines 1–4; 17–24)

The final lines here release the poem and its ideas about religion into a freer atmosphere, beyond the human constructedness of credos and of poetry. Religion and poetry are ‘given,’ and only intermittently so, the work of something beyond the human, part of creation, as gorgeous and ethereal as ‘crested pigeon, rosella parrot’ flying in utter naturalness, above human foibles and desires. God in this poem is the principal of non-closure, a ‘law’ greater than human plans. All Murray’s poetry collections are dedicated ‘To the Glory of God,’ a fact which has made many critics nervous or dismissive. The emphasis of Judith Beveridge’s poetry, different to Murray’s, falls on human and living presence. Informed by Buddhist spiritual traditions, Beveridge also sees a freedom in the sacred, a sacred intimately connected to the presence of the body – the human and different to human bodies – which is capable of acting with reverence and care, thankfulness, and attention. In ‘Man Washing on a Railway Platform outside Delhi’ (1996) we read: … It’s the way his hands take the water from the tap to his body. It’s the way he attends each pore. It’s the way he decants the water back and forth as if receiving instruction for the repetition of the names of God. And it’s the way he knows his poverty without privacy – and the way, though the water is free, he takes careful litres. (Accidental 39; lines 24–35)

The man being quietly observed ‘decants,’ ‘attends,’ ‘takes careful litres,’ ‘receiving / instruction for the repetition / of the names of God.’ So too the poet is attentive, the movement of each line evoking the movement of the man washing. The poetic eye is observing the material and the bodily, and indeed is gauging the political realities of a man who ‘knows his poverty / without privacy’; but it is an eye also observing the body as vessel of the sacred, the man’s washing becoming a ritual imbued with dignity and attentiveness. The sacred here is in the practice of daily life – ‘it’s the way his hands / take the water … the way / he attends … it’s the way he knows … and the way … he takes careful litres.’ This honouring of the human as part of a sacred economy of meaning-making in ‘Man Washing on a Railway Platform outside Delhi’ is moving. In this way the poem becomes a kind of liturgy. Rather than a politics of oppositionality, the poem offers the sacred dimensions of human life as its strongest proposition.

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An appropriate comparison to Beveridge’s poem might be Murray’s ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow,’ where the image of a weeping man’s expression of dignity and pain is central. The tension of this poem is between the private, intimate, ordinary human body and its public significance. But again there are differences in the sacred register of both poems. For Murray, like Beveridge, the ordinary is the source of sacredness, but it is also in Murray given a more symbolic, transcendent meaning: … the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing, the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out of his writhen face and ordinary body not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow, hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea – (24; lines 39–43)

This tension between being and meaning, between ordinary human presence and something beyond, above, or other than human, is held differently by each poet, but it is a sacredness that is intimated centrally by both. To concentrate on such sacredness is not a methodology preeminently, but a readerly (and writerly) choice: a willingness to sit within the circle of another’s desires for sacrednesss, which is a generosity required of any reading act. From the novels of Tim Winton, to the poetry of younger poets such as Lachlan Brown and Maryam Azam, there are multiple modes of representing and testing this tension between the material and the spiritual, and different responses from ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ the faith traditions. In the poetry of emerging poet Azam, according to Anupama Pilbrow, … what The Hijab Files does, is show that the piercing of this place is not only the piercing of the mundane by the transcendental; it is equally the piercing of the transcendental by the mundane … [it] identifies and describes a flexibility and porousness in objects often thought of as stable and rigid. Cloth, faith, identity, reality become elastic. It conceives of worldly life as capable of sustaining simultaneity of perception, and as movement between piercing moments of profundity and mundanity. Similarly, through Winton’s many novels, from early works such as That Eye, the Sky (1986) to Shepherd’s Hut (2017), we can trace a coruscating movement of thought and language – narrative, lyrical, character-based – testing the relationship between human and divine. Sacred longing in Winton is restless, unfixed, human, reaching out through often loss-raddled characters. Ort in That Eye, the Sky waits and watches as his father, in a coma after an accident, slowly and miraculously returns to the world; Tom in Eyrie (2013) has to work through his boozed and self-pitying fall from grace, to find out for himself if such grace might be reclaimed; and in Shepherd’s Hut, two ‘fallen’ human beings, an ex-priest and a boy on the run from a violent childhood, find beauty and a level of peace in each other’s company. But the arc of these narratives sounds trite when described thus. Where and how sacred meaning emerges in these novels, and in Winton’s short story collection, The Turning (2005), needs careful and generous readerly response. Like Murray, Winton is certainly not universally loved in Australia, his religious beliefs often misunderstood, or ignored by critics. In a 2004 radio interview, Winton described the evolution of his Christian faith: That whole idea of the world being a body of God that Hildegard von Bingen alludes to, and I think for me it’s not being an environmentalist for the sake of survival or honouring the earth, it’s really about, it’s a sacramental mission … When you see the material world and all living things, and all solid things impregnated with the Divine, it really shakes you up … it

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reorients you … and also in a way kind of makes you less exclusively Christian. Which, as I’ve got older, has become more important. (qtd in Kohn) Twenty-first-century sacredness, whatever the vocabulary – presence, the divine, sacramental, holy, spirit, faith, belief – must engage with this kind of inclusivity. Humans inhabit a world which is Muslim, Indigenous, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Secular, and expressive of many other forms and traditions. Individuals approach, or move away from these faiths, as they must, but the incessant desires of individuals and communities to make meaning, to access value, practices and beliefs while living in a material, earthed world are undeniable. In this, Australians owe much to Indigenous peoples who knew, long before capitalism and ‘the West’ came into being, that ‘sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or “mother nature,” and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom’ (‘Uluru’; original emphasis) and the core of a sacred approach to life. So, we turn to the document, ‘Uluru: Statement from the Heart,’ produced by Indigenous leaders in 2017, and duly rebuffed by the Australian federal parliament. Here sacredness, represented as both physical and spiritual, is claimed as the source of well-being for Australian Indigenous peoples. An Indigenous Referendum Council of 16 was jointly appointed on 7 December 2015 by both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to advise the government on steps towards a referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian Constitution. Delegates, numbering more than 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from around Australia, attended the 2017 First Nations National Constitutional Convention at Uluru, the central and symbolic location for Indigenous peoples, formerly known as Ayer’s Rock (Allam, ‘Indigenous Voice to Parliament’). At this convention the ‘Uluru: Statement from the Heart’ was welcomed with a standing ovation (‘Uluru’). The diction and deep gestures of this piece importantly come together as both spiritual and political: We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart: Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial,’ and according to science more than 60 000 years ago. This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature,’ and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown. How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years? … Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination. We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history … for a better future. (‘Uluru’) In a movingly poetic register, the document melts the borders between secular and sacred, for ‘this sovereignty is a spiritual notion.’ The processes which forged ‘Uluru: Statement from the Heart’ 278

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were both political – seeking parliamentary and social action towards a referendum – and deeply spiritual, symbolic and affective, declaring that on the basis that Indigenous peoples possessed their lands for 60 millennia, this link is ‘sacred.’ However, in the glaring light of the fumblings of Parliament to take up the spirit of this document, a gaping wound still manifests itself in contemporary Australia. In the latest ‘development,’ Coalition Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion, in a 2019 parliamentary committee debate with Indigenous senator Pat Dodson, said of the Statement: ‘It’s more than poetry, that’s what was asked for’ (Allam, ‘Pat Dodson and Nigel Scullion’). Secular, political processes of government, it seems, will not so easily be duped by poetic discourses of a spiritual dimension. Nevertheless, poetic Indigenous voices have played, and are playing, a sustaining and central role in this epic struggle. The poetry of David Unaipon, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Lionel Fogarty, Tony Birch, and many other Indigenous artists has provoked response to the political and spiritual in poetic union. For example, in the deeply affecting lament, ‘Bora Ring’ by Oodgeroo (1964), in Fogarty’s strange and utopian ‘Farewell Reverberated Vault of Detentions’ (1995), and in Birch’s historical reimagining in ‘The True History of Beruk (William Barak)’ (2006), Indigenous poets have sought to activate both Indigenous and non-Indigenous political awareness through poetic processes: calling on empathy towards others, which includes an acknowledgement of ongoing violence and cruelty, even genocide, against a people; prophetic remembering, so that the future might be deeply informed by the past; utopian retrievals and honouring of languages; and an acknowledgement of other rituals and other living practices which nourish meaning and community. Hence, what is upheld is remembrance, lament, hope, prophesy, righteous anger, and the realisation of wrong-doing, truth-telling, words found to speak the unsayable, the deep links between past and present, the need to hear otherwise, through communities greater than the individual, the acknowledgement of creation as gift. All these values and beliefs inform so much of Indigenous Australians’ poetic texts, and they are also deeply sacred values. To use the term ‘sacred’ is not to forget or occlude material, human, so-called secular values, and the need for political action. It is a call for a new direction, where sacred and secular are not held in separate categories, but allowed to interpenetrate, to be seen as intersectional conditions. As poet and critic Fiona Hile writes: you could, as with the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, nominate [St] Paul as the father of poetry and see in [Lionel] Fogarty’s new collection a drawing together of the past, the present and the future that conjures Paul’s recapitulation of messianic time as ‘the time of the now.’ In what may for some read as an uncomfortable conjoining of poetic and sacred, Hile defends her risky methodology by concluding: If the analogy between Fogarty and Paul is in danger of figuring Fogarty as nothing more than a dupe or reduplicator of Christian tropes we only need to look at the anxiety that his excavation of language provokes to realise there is something new at hand. What the critic is excavating for herself, and in Fogarty, is a new language where sacred and political, spiritual and material worlds inform each other. She again draws on Agamben in this: messianic time – insofar as what is at stake in it is the fulfillment of times – brings about a recapitulation, a sort of abridgement of all things, both heavenly and earthly – a vertiginous consummation of the whole history, in which all the events which occurred from the creation on are summoned to appearing in the messianic now. (Agamben qtd in Hile) 279

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The time, vision, revelation of pain, the new languages and hope of literature, not despite its political visions of violence and loss, but through them, is what Hile focuses on in Fogarty, and in poetry more generally. With Agamben she sees (some) poetry as possessing a soteriological capacity, as ‘an organism or a temporal device which from its very beginning is tensed toward its end, [and that there] … is a kind of eschatology internal to the poem’ (Hile). How bleak and oppositional this must make some readers feel, this argument for the intimate relation between material text and sacred meanings. It is not of course a new argument. The Jewish poets of the Psalms knew it. So did Indigenous singers and storytellers across the millennia, and John Donne, Hildegard von Bingen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Patrick White, Frances Webb, Marilyn Robinson, and many others. But to end on this note, drawing up the ranks of overtly religious writers against all opposition, would be to diminish the argument of this chapter, producing a ‘them versus us’ approach. Rather, this chapter has been seeking an approach which is inclusive, an understanding of the sacred which leaves to readers, finally, the choice to hear and acknowledge what is often overtly ‘there’ in the text, but often implicitly. Spiritual struggle can be identified in political texts, in texts that may not name their struggle as sacred. This move may annoy (at the very least) those who want completely to omit any sacred or spiritual dimension. But in Australia today, and around the globe, challenges of a ‘messianic’ nature, in Agamben’s terms, are evident. Of course politics will play a part, but so should an inclusive, non-sectarian, poetic, and powerful understanding of the sacred be at play: a vision of ‘all solid things impregnated with the Divine’ (Winton qtd in Kohn), Hile’s ‘something new at hand.’

Note 1 Permission to quote from Vincent Buckley’s poetry in this chapter provided by John Leonard Press; permission to quote from Les Murray’s poetry provided by MC Agency; permission to quote from Judith Beveridge’s poetry provided by UQP.

Works Cited Allam, Lorena. ‘Indigenous Voice to Parliament Given New Momentum at Burunga Hearings.’ Guardian 7 Jun. 2018. . ———. ‘Pat Dodson and Nigel Scullion Spar Over “Perplexing” Indigenous Voice Budget Allocation.’ Guardian 5 Apr. 2019. . Azam, Maryam. The Hijab Files. Sydney, NSW: Giramondo, 2018. Beveridge, Judith. The Domesticity of Giraffes. Sydney, NSW: Black Lightning, 1987. ———. Accidental Grace. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1996. Birch, Tony. ‘The True History of Beruk.’ Meanjin 65.1 (2006): 72–76. Birns, Nicholas. Contemporary Australian Literature. Sydney: Sydney UP, 2015. Bourke, Lawrence. A Vivid Steady State: Les Murray and Australian Poetry. Sydney: UNSW P/New Endeavour, 1992. Brown, Lachlan. Seeing a Shadow, Speaking a Name, Listening for Silence: Reading the Poetry of Kevin Hart. Unpublished PhD diss. U of Sydney, 2009. ———. Lunar Inheritance. Sydney, NSW: Giramondo, 2017. Buckley, Vincent. Poetry and the Sacred. London: Chatto and Windus, 1968. ———. Collected Poems. Ed. Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Melbourne, VIC: John Leonard, 2009. Davidson, Toby. Beast Language. Melbourne, VIC: Five Islands, 2013. ———. Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2013. Hile, Fiona. ‘Fiona Hile Reviews Lionel Fogarty.’ Cordite Poetry Review 10 Mar. 2015. . Hills, Lia. The Crying Place. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2017.

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Australian Literature and the Sacred Kohn, Rachel. ‘Tim Winton’s Faith.’ ABC Radio National 26 Dec. 2004. . Lindsay, Elaine. Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. McCredden, Lyn. James McAuley. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1992. ———. ‘Between Worlds: Approaching the Indigenous Sacred in Australia.’ Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions. Ed. Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 70–87. ———. ‘In Dialogue with Robert Gray.’ Double Dialogues 5 (2003): 1–10. ———. ‘The Impossible Infinite: Les Murray, Poetry, and the Sacred.’ Antipodes 19.2 (2005): 166–171. ———. ‘Contemporary Poetry and the Sacred: Vincent Buckley, Les Murray and Samuel Wagan Watson.’ Australian Literary Studies 23.2 (2007): 153–167. ———. ‘The Locatedness of Poetry.’ JASAL spec. iss. (2009): 1–10. . ———. Luminous Moments: The Contemporary Sacred. Hindmarsh, SA: ATF, 2010. ———. ‘Voss: Earthed and Transformative Sacredness.’ Remembering Patrick White: Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 109–123. ———. ‘Splintering and Coalescing: Language and the Sacred in Patrick White’s Novels.’ Patrick White Centenary: The Legacy of a Prodigal Son. Ed. Bill Ashcroft and Cynthia van den Driesen. Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. 43–62. ———. ‘Violence and the Sacred: Patrick White’s Radical Vision.’ Patrick White: Critical Issues. Ed. Ishmeet Kaur. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2014. 52–66. ———. ‘Tim Winton’s Poetics of Resurrection.’ Literature and Theology 29.3 (2015): 323–334. ———. The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2016. ———. ‘Tim Winton: Abjection, Meaning-Making and Australian Sacredness.’ JASAL 16.1 (2016): 1–9. . McCredden, Lyn, and Nathanael O’Reilly, ed. Tim Winton: Critical Essays. Perth: U of Western Australia P, 2014. McLaren, John D. Journey Without Arrival: The Life and Writing of Vincent Buckley. North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly, 2009. Murray, Les. ‘Poetry and Religion.’ Collected Poems. Melbourne, VIC: Black Inc., 2018. 235–236. ———. ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow.’ The Weatherboard Cathedral. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1969. 24–25. Pilbrow, Anupama. ‘Rev. The Hijab Files.’ Cordite Poetry Review 23 Oct. 2018. . Rayment, Colette. The Shapes of Glory: The Writings of Peter Steel. Richmond, VIC: Spectrum, 2000. Rutledge, David. ‘The Poetry of Lachlan Brown.’ Earshot. 3 Jun. 2015. . Sheridan, Susan, and Paul Genoni, ed. Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Smith, Ali Jane. ‘Becoming Fay Zwicky.’ Sydney Review of Books 1 Nov. 2017. . Smith, Vivian Brian. James McAuley. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1970. Tacey, David. Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth. Sydney, NSW: HarperCollins, 1995. ‘Uluru: Statement from the Heart.’ Referendum Council 30 Jun. 2017. . Wagan Watson, Sam. Smoke Encrypted Whispers. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2005. Winton, Tim. That Eye, the Sky. Melbourne, VIC: McPhee Gribble, 1986. ———. The Turning. London: Picador, 2005. ———. Eyrie. Sydney, NSW: Penguin, 2013. ———. The Shepherd’s Hut. London: Picador, 2018.

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29 ANIMAL PRESENCE Problems and Potential in Recent Australian Fiction Clare Archer-Lean

As Delia Falconer attests, there has been a resurgence in animals in Australian literary fiction. Colonial literary animals established an emergent national symbology, such as Banjo Paterson’s ‘jumbuck,’ or Frederick Sinnett’s evocation of ‘local colour’ through ‘Australian characteristics … kangaroos, emus, stringy barks’ (qtd in Gelder and Weaver 17).1 For much of the twentieth century, animals are often absent, or the stuff of children’s fable and allegory. But since at least the mid-1990s, Australian writers have been shifting the game, probing animal representation to explore the material realities of the more-than-human as well as the violence implicit in the human/animal relationship. Such developments in Australian fiction are contextualised by ‘literary animal studies’ internationally, a field which avoids reading the animal as peripheral and symbolic (Parry 5), instead conjuring the animal ‘into (representational) presence’ (Tiffin 6). To read and write in this way requires ‘conscientious’ consideration of the human and animal vulnerabilities resulting from human/animal distinctions (McKay 637) and exposing what Anat Pick calls ‘consolatory’ thinking, that is discursive practices that minimise and rationalise human cruelty towards animals (11). Nuance in the reading (and writing) of zoomorphism, therianthropism, and anthropomorphism is central to such concerns. Pertinent to recent Australian animal fiction are four preoccupations of literary animal studies: ‘tracing’ animal visibility in fiction (Armstrong 3), the vexing nature of representation and the limits of reproduction of real animals (Simons 87), affect and sympathy in human/non-human relationships (Tiffin 46), and finally interspecies communication (47). The above synopsis obviously fails to address the complexity and prolificity of animal literary studies in the last 30 years, but allows an entry point in the short space this chapter allows. A brief overview of some of the more recent standout animal fictions demonstrates the debates in animal literary studies. J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003) is metafiction placed on the interstices between affect, language, visibility and representation in fiction. The eponymous protagonist’s guest lectures patrol the limits and potential of what Costello terms the ‘sympathetic imagination’ to explore animal representation (among other concerns of realist fiction) against the lived experiences of animals in a modernity characterised by extreme violence (Coetzee 195). As Fiona Jenkins argues, Costello’s intertextual allusions to animal stories all evoke an empathic, yet strange kinship, as challenge to her audience (26). Ceridwen Dovey, like Coetzee, references Franz Kaf ka and his speaking ape, as well as Costello herself, as a way to mobilise this same sympathetic imagination. Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014) uses the device of animal

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autobiography to ventriloquise fabular animal voices from the grave. The animal narrators, as first-person revenants, speak to the reader and challenge human exceptionalism through memory of human/non-human intimacies (Archer-Lean). Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish (1995) deploys experiments in animal language acquisition to traverse moral boundaries. A young gorilla, Eliza, spliced with human genes and adopted by human parents, is taught Aslan sign language by J.J., a human tutor. The relationship quickly becomes one of interspecies curiosity and desire. J.J. reflects on the transgressive implications of Eliza’s desires to be more human, evident in her drawing hairless, upright self-portraits: ‘The irony of it took my breath away – was the gorilla herself guilty of the sin of anthropomorphism?’ (Goldsworthy 200). The pair are punished for their sexual encounter: J.J. is convicted of ‘bestiality,’ while Eliza is imprisoned in a zoo, ‘signing frantically’ (200), before committing suicide. Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009) pivots on the profound transgression of the human/animal boundary in post-perestroika Moscow. The child protagonist, Romochka, epitomises the ‘feral child’ trope, as he is literally raised and suckled by wild dogs. Here the implications of ‘feral’ are radically revised as ‘a viable alternative social order’: filthy, yet moral and ritualised (Garrard, ‘Ferality Tales’ 252). Romochka’s strong therianthropic desire for a canine, physio-morphology reverses Eliza’s anthropomorphic aspirations. State child protection ultimately destroys Romochka’s canine family. In both Dog Boy and Wish, the capacity for human cruelty juxtaposed with animal tenderness, sentience and affection challenges the human/animal boundary. All these narratives question human exceptionalism. Some explore the link between animal as literary idea and animal as subject of human cruelty (Coetzee, Dovey) while others share an attempt to represent animal communications and social orders as morally superior to human corruptions. Charlotte Wood is another writer who explores these themes, but what is so interesting about Wood’s work is her intersection of animal considerations with other questions of power. In doing so, Wood displays the complex paradoxes at work in any human writer’s attempt to disrupt the human animal boundary. Wood’s Animal People (2011) establishes animal treatment in Wood’s oeuvre through a critique of pet ownership. In what follows, I argue that The Natural Way of Things extends this, evoking a complex typology to think through much broader lingual and figurative issues crucial to questions of animals in Australian fiction, both despite and because it revels in the trapping and eating of animal bodies. Wood’s animals exist in a literary trompe l’oeil, revealing both the limits and political potentialities of animal representation. The forms of oppression Wood brings to centre stage through her powerful allegory include the victim blaming implicit in patriarchal violence and Australia’s particularly underhanded and repugnant historical and contemporary use of detention (Sheridan 197). Susan Sheridan clarifies the strong allegorical significances: In Wood’s novel, set in a time very much like the present, ten young women are drugged and taken to a remote location, apparently an abandoned sheep station, which is completely cut off from the outside world. There they are held indefinitely, in primitive conditions … without trial, without any prospect of freedom, and staff openly abuse inmates. (197) The Natural Way of Things also speaks to ‘literary animal studies’ as Marion W Copeland defines it: the deconstruction of ‘disrespectful’ animal representation; the presentation of the species- specific, individual animal agent; and finally, to scrutinise past human/animal relationships (symbolic and otherwise) to arrive at a ‘shared world’ (92). There are several orders of animal representation within the text. This chapter concentrates on modes that free (or not) the animal from what John Simons calls the ‘aporia’ of representational ‘models that are determined by our interests not [animals’]’ (134). Wood’s use of the animal is complex, detailed and paradoxical.

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Woman as Animal Wood has defined her aim as understanding the historically entrenched and ubiquitous notions of patriarchal violence.2 Hers is a powerful fictive experiment to scrutinise the social discourse that ‘girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves’ (Wood, Natural 176). The deconstruction of this contention is entirely dependent on animal imagery. Language as a tool for patriarchy is underscored through excessive misogynist crude zoomorphisms. When Yolanda is taken, groggy, to be shaved, she is shoved ‘sprawling, exactly as a sheep would totter down a slatted chute into the shocking light and shit and terror’ (17). Verla is led around ‘like a donkey’ (20). Canine symbolism is central: girls are constantly put on ‘leads,’ herded ‘like dogs’ (49), ‘lunge at their food like dogs’ (45), sleep in dogboxes. Reversal of anthropomorphism has the effect of losing the distinctions between animals and human (Simons 124–125). We are shocked by the treatment of the girls and as a consequence ‘shocking light’ is cast on ‘the shit and terror’ of animals’ lives (17). The reciting of zoomorphic, misogynist abuse by both Boncer and Teddy (the witless perpetuators of patriarchal punishment) is consistent with the verbal abuse and expletives in character’s interior memories of ‘before’: ‘yuck-ugly-dog … pig-on-aspit’ (Wood, Natural 48). The first stage in Yolanda’s freedom comes with her refusal of such epitaphs and a donning of the steel traps so she can gather food for her community; that is, to know she is strong enough to hunt and that Boncer is to be pitied: ‘She felt the weight of the traps, and all of that – slut slagheap fat-arsed ugly dogbitch – was finished’ (144). These representations can be read through Carol J. Adams’s ‘sexual politics of meat … the attitude and action that animalises women and sexualises and feminises animals’ (xviii). Crucial to Adams’s analysis is the notion of the ‘absent referent’ (19), where the individual and specific animal subject is removed in the act of meat eating. The ‘absent referent’ also refers to a common systemic discursive silence implicit in animal and human female exploitation: the fragmentation, objectification and violence behind the patriarchy are untraceable in the act of consumption (20–21). From a literary animal studies perspective, then, the extent to which an animal is present is vital. Wood’s exposure of patriarchy’s crude zoomorphisms begins a materialisation of the hitherto absent referent. The girls become meat: after their heads are shaved, they are ‘raw sausage’ (Wood, Natural 46), and Nancy’s death is made olfactory through ‘the smell of raw meat’ (268). Such a figural mode complicates the animal as absent referent in patriarchal exploitation and segmentation. Adjacent to the process is a critique of the sentimental romanticisation of the animal in the service of a heteronormative and patriarchal symbology.

Deconstruction of Romantic Projection Wood is critical of the anthropomorphic projection of human desires upon animals. The theme of non-human entities as symbols for human mythos is most overtly portrayed in this novel through Verla’s memories of her married, high-profile lover, Andrew. Andrew’s ‘devotion’ is signified via the gifting and reciting of Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman (115). At first glance, the Whitman allusion speaks to the poet’s celebration of the body as sensuous and spiritual, as bound to life and death, rather than immoral or impure (Mulcaire). More specifically, in terms of Wood’s critique of public patriarchal victim blaming, the allusion is a nod to the gifting of Leaves of Grass to Monica Lewinski by Bill Clinton in 1997 (‘Special Report’). The allusion operates to critique a pastoral idealisation of nature as a vehicle for human spiritual transcendence. Romantic and pastoral fiction has been deemed exploitative of nature for human spiritual needs. Garrard sees William Wordsworth as exemplar of this trend, as he is ‘far more interested in the relationship of non-human nature to the human mind than he is in nature in and for itself ’ (Ecocriticism 43). Similarly, Whitman uses sensual imagery to enmesh the human body with nature in a transcendent idealism (Killingsworth). Verla’s longing for the white horse is an emblem of the blurred lines between 284

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the real and the romanticised in heteronormative sexuality. At night, locked in her ‘dog box,’ she hears the horse feeding, and believes she walks alongside it in her dreams and fevered hallucinations (Wood, Natural 136–137). Verla clings to the horse as spiritual visitant, her spectral vehicle for freedom, in a parody of the romanticisation of female sexual exploitation and animal symbology within androcentric notions of transcendence. Verla’s sense of her separateness is fraudulent and dependent on an idyll, where she is the horse, in some ‘liberated, ghostly form’ (258). Verla believes she will be united with the horse and carried to ‘her rightful life, to the little Whitman book, to Andrew waiting with cries of sorrow and poetry’ (258–259). When juxtaposed with the harsh reality of existence at Hardings, her interior reflections are deluded. The horse is a chimera, a metaphor for the dangers in romanticised ‘love’ which can mask exploitation. As the narrative progresses, the horse slips beyond Verla’s preposterous romantic projections. Verla’s understanding of the Whitman poetry shifts markedly from a redemptive celebration of her sexuality to a symbol of Andrew’s own self-love. She finds the horse dead after Hetty’s suicide, importantly figured as ‘a swag of rotting grey canvas’ (268; my emphasis). The horse may have been real, but not as a saviour or visitant, these fantasies are baggage Verla (and her enculturation) bestowed upon it. At this moment, Verla comprehends a parallel male fantasy and self-love that is projected onto women, that she was ‘an empty space to be occupied’ (282). Pastoral idealism of nature or woman cannot occupy what Jennifer Crawford would call an ‘empathic mimesis’ (qtd in Donovan 74). It is a projection of self onto an emptied metaphor. Midway through the text, the tortuous overwork, confusion and patriarchal violence of the early days at Hardings give way to an existential vacuity. The electricity fails and the girls become dependent on Yolanda’s traps and rabbit meat, while still subject to the sexual threat and predation of their two ‘guards.’ This period of mounting insanity and boredom presents an opportunity to critique other human uses of the animals. Pets, like the transcendent animal visitant, serve the emotional, spiritual, psychic and physical needs of an ‘I’ who does not acknowledge the equal subjectivity of the ‘other’ (Buber qtd in Donovan 81). The pet trope is significant in The Natural Way of Things: ‘[t]hey all had pets now. They were going mad, or finding some strange happiness’ (Wood, Natural 182). Most of the girls’ pets are artificial: such as a ute with ‘thin, white bones protruding’ (182). Maitlynd, however, approximates a semblance of normative domestic pet discourses: [Her] pet was real: a frog, a great ugly thing that lurked beneath the water tank. She patrolled the windowsills each morning for moths, grabbing and cupping the live ones, filling the bowl of her skirt with dead ones like petals. She carried them and squatted beside the tank, crooning and whispering as she held them out and the thing darted and gobbled. (183–184) Here a fault line opens in Wood’s representation of animality. There is a critique of the animal as pet, as service provider to human emotional needs, coaxed into simulation of intersubjectivity. But we also see a mechanomorphistic approach to the animal: the frog is ‘ugly,’ oblivious, a ‘thing’ or automaton that can only ‘dart’ and ‘gobble.’ But before turning to this complication in Wood’s taxonomy of animal referentiality, I want to first trace a prior, more positive imagining of animal actuality.

Animal as Present Being In critiquing reductive, romantic allegory and exposing the ‘absent referent’ implicit in patriarchy and anthropocentricism, Wood has created space for animal as present subject, freed from referential absence. Actual animals constitute a third, more mimetic order of representation in The Natural Way of Things. The agency of animal appears primarily through Yolanda. Yolanda wants to understand the birds through their own voices, inventing species names based on her 285

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interpretation of their sounds and agency: ‘waterfall birds and squeakers’ (4). These early impressions are developed into a kind of twitcher’s appreciation as Leandra teaches the girls to recognise and name all the bird calls, ‘[a]ll with separate cries’ (104), acknowledging their distinctiveness. This empathic attention to animals on their own terms can be read as consistent with Josephine Donovan’s ‘aesthetics of care,’ where the writer engages with the animal other as a ‘subject not an object’: Such engagement requires paying emotional as well as intellectual attention to the particular other and his or her milieu. It means being with the subjects, seeing through their eyes, feeling through their bodies … seeing through their eyes … not standing apart as an outside observer but integrated into the same world as the observed. (Donovan 92–93; original emphasis) Wood is attentive to such workings and traces of animal lives: ‘daddy long leg’ spiders are ‘delicate balloons’ (Natural 21), ‘slow, long-bodied’ wasps weave their own ‘swaying’ existence (79) and a ‘wedge tailed eagle is pursued by ravens’ (88). Similarly, animal death is, in part, treated with a reverence and clarification of the animal subject. Yolanda is frightened by the absoluteness of the first dead rabbit she finds in the traps but accepts her responsibility: ‘The rabbit looked so dead, squashed there. It was she who had killed it’ (158). The figuration of Yolanda’s initial attempts at skinning captures both human violence in animal death and a common species morality and connection. Skinning is likened to the pulling of ‘an arrow … a cracked whip’ and the pink, skinned bodies are ‘curled like unborn babies’ (168). Omniscient narration presents an exact moment in the skinning process where ‘the rabbit stops being itself, begins being food’ (171), belying the invisibility of the animal subject in modern meat production where animals are ‘hidden away in … factory farms; slaughtered at mass disassembly plants and transformed into sanitised packages of meat’ (Vint 1). Yolanda immerses herself in the practical visceral nature of her tasks in laying and collecting traps, skinning, removing brains for the preparation of skins and furs. She apologises to the animals she kills and works with, and thanks them (Wood, Natural 179, 190). In time Yolanda comes to a more complex understanding of the animal life beyond the corpses she locates in the traps. She examines the fur for traces of existence and individuality: evidence of fights makes one ‘a warrior’ (179), and she shows tenderness for their ‘fine, little heads’ (190).3

Woman as Animal: Debunking Human Exceptionalism Part of the transformation within the confines of the fence is a movement away from dominant discourses and constructions of femininity into animalisation. The zoomorphisms that exist in the second half of the novel are less to do with exposing patriarchal treatment of woman as abject animal and more to do with a coming into being with a renewed animal self. As Rachel Fetherston suggests, Wood’s characters become progressively ‘less human, more animalistic and more connected to the landscape.’ They evoke a desire for an ecological revision to a post-symbolic order, beyond the lingual containments critiqued by the broader novel. Of course, this therianthropic movement is most fully realised in Yolanda, in her appearance (enmeshed in animal furs) and in her rejection of language itself. This metamorphosis is foreshadowed repeatedly. After months of labouring for Hardings, the omniscient narrator asks if the girls are recognisable: ‘hair returning as thick pelts … like possum fur … oily as feathers, thinned and coarsened by the rubbish they eat. Verla’s is the worst … coarse fur … Nancy is … ratty-haired’ (110–111). Before the electric power is lost, the food stores run out and the group resorts to rabbit meat, Teddy begins to fear the girls’ otherness, their lice, and ‘their thin feral bodies, their animal disease and power’ (150). When, in

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preparation of Hetty’s doll, Barb locates their shorn hair the girls ‘squat on their haunches’ (222) and cry like ‘mother seals for their babies’ (219). Ferality is thus a liminal existence, as Neave argues through Dog Boy, embodying the privations of exclusion from political protection ‘yet subject to the state’ (3–4). Wood has observed there are strong parallels between the plight of her fictive women and the experience of those victim to Australia’s refugee policy (in Wyndham), a point Susan Sheridan also makes. The feral, animalised body is crucial to the text’s layered deconstruction of immoral state, patriarchal, anthropocentric power. The Natural Way of Things is punctuated by bodies vexing patriarchal containment. Yolanda reflects on her socialised self-disgust at her own leaking female body, with its ‘purged but regrowing, unstoppable... weed’ each month showing that she was ‘meat, was born to make meat’ (122). In this way, Yolanda reciprocates the paradox of speaking meat. For Val Plumwood, ‘meat’ is the most ‘delegitimated subject possible’ and it is the task of films such as Babe (1995) to enable an ‘expressive, narrative subject’ (58–59). Yolanda’s epiphany constructs a kind of reverse anthropomorphism, in John Simons’s sense (127), challenging us to know ourselves as meat, and thus the logic of meat-making as abhorrent. It also exposes the tissues of connectivity between anthropocentricism and patriarchy. From the realisation of the self as ‘meat’ comes a refusal of patriarchal segmentation and containment. There is no subject, no separate self. Yolanda reframes her past rape experience in animal terms that zoomorphise all entities: she is ‘fleecy, punishable flesh’ but the men who commit the rape are depicted as having ‘pawed and thrust and butted’ (Wood, Natural 122). These interior reflections expose Yolanda’s absorption of sexual violence into ‘the natural way of things,’ but not in terms that allow men rational distance or her own culpability. The human/non-human boundary is made utterly permeable through Yolanda’s metamorphosis and her rejection of language and thus patriarchal symbolic order. Most of the girls understand Yolanda’s transformation as revoking humanity and sanity. Verla, however, perceives the gravity of Yolanda’s resistance. Verla sees that Yolanda does not want ‘human friendships’ and interprets their parallel quests into the fields each dawn as that of human and canine (257). Later Verla understands more: Yolanda represents a post-patriarchal order where women exist in renewed sisterhood, as ‘protector[s], fellow creature[s]’ (310). Yolanda finds ‘some primitive strength mounting’ as she prepares the skins and traps: It was a vigour to do with air and earth. Animal blood and guts, the moon and the season. It was beyond her named self, beyond girl, or female. Beyond human, even. It was to do with muscle sliding around bone, to do with animal speed and scent and bloody heartbeat and breath. (193; original emphasis) Yolanda’s therianthropic refusal to participate in a linguistic order (201) that defines her as object for male use, her escape out of the gate, as ‘fully animal, released’ (193), allows Wood to revisit earlier character insights into the woman as animal. The animal Yolanda becomes is redress to her fearful affinity with the ‘cold, incessant production’ (31) of her brother’s pet mice, fear founded in the abject hairlessness of the ‘dusty pink thumb’ (30) of the mice babies and their likeness to waxed women in her mother’s home beauty parlour. The frightening mouse babies of Yolanda’s childhood are, at Hardings, replaced by the rabbit kittens birthed by a doe in the cold dawn. Yolanda’s child disgust is substituted by a messianic and maternal desire to enfold the infant kittens in ‘the cradle of [her] animal self ’ (216). The movement from fear to union with an animal self is also, finally, realised by Verla when she chooses potential starvation and isolation by insisting to be let off the bus at the novel’s dénouement, a bus purportedly bound for patriarchal normality as the girls knew it before Hardings. For Verla, this constitutes rejection of signification through ‘old Walt Whitman’ choosing instead ‘a living pulse’ in Yolanda’s ‘sister’ call (310).

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Is the Absent Referent Still Hidden? Despite this, there is still a vacating of the animal in the affinity with blood, fur, skins and ‘living pulse’ (310). In order for Yolanda to inhabit her animal guise, to embrace her invisibility to patriarchy, she literally empties others of their living and embodied present and inhabits their skin. Her embrace of the birthing doe and her kittens annihilates them; indeed, the vast majority of animals in the novel are dead. Thus, Yolanda’s dreams of animal freedom, her survival through a psychic burrowing, her movement described as ‘low and fast as a rabbit’ (308), sits oddly with her carnivorous lifestyle, enabled through metal traps. For Verla, inhabiting an animal existence comes with her dreams of donning a grotesque, visceral lamb’s head, ‘her body replacing its own, its entrails spilling out like bathwater. She must occupy the lamb’s body. She looks out of its bloodrimmed eyes at a cold, pink-stained world’ (245). Like Yolanda’s metamorphosis, Verla’s variously dreamed animal transmogrifications signify on multiple levels. They convey the hallucinogenic mode in which she is operating, first as a ‘trout’ (138), brought on by fever and Nancy’s experimental medical care, then via her self-testing of mushrooms in her plot to murder Boncer. These are also images of freedom or, conversely, sacrifice, drawing on the empty pastoral mode to which Andrew subjected her. Ultimately, ironically, the girls are returning to a natural way of things, where women and animal are ruled by a like biological imperative. There is a troubling parallel implied between the need to menstruate, to fart, to toilet outside, with the need to hunt and kill and the needs of men who must ‘fuck.’ Hetty agrees to be offered up as sexual offering to Boncer, a price paid for the relative freedom from direct sexual exploitation of the other girls. She exacts a dreadful trade, a ghastly homemade doll of fur and hair, and names it Ransom (232). Arguably, all this involves a deployment of the same figuration the rest of the text is critiquing. Boncer’s phallic ‘need’ and the offering up of Hetty as ransom means what happens inside the fence is always an extension of what happens outside of it, despite the girls’ various transformations and empowerments. In this way, Wood is arguably carrying the analogy too far, or rather is allowing the animal imagery to become so pervasive as to obscure some of the feminist criticism of both patriarchy and speciesism offered. Wood’s novel is then partly complicit in projection onto animal signifiers, and in a naturalisation of certain carnist and patriarchal notions of the human animal. Donovan suggests that projection of figuration onto animals is inimically linked to death, instead advocating for a concern for animal referents, not as dead material available for aesthetic manipulation and framing but as a living presence, located in a particular, ‘knowable’ environment (11). As suggested above, the precise movement from animal subject to meat is made transparent, as is human culpability in this violence. But juxtaposed with this clarity there is an aestheticising and thus anaesthetising of this process which collapses the individual animal into an ever-replicating concertina of animal representation that prohibits the animal as subject. When Yolanda locates the first rabbit caught in the trap, she interprets what she sees through a representational capital that removes the rabbit and substitutes other animals as ornamental signifiers. The dew patterned on the rabbit’s long back is ‘like fish scales, like platypus hair’ (Wood, Natural 157). The same phenomenon appears in Yolanda’s memory of an animal documentary in which an elephant birth features a placenta as a shocking ‘great, meaty fleece … slippery, shaggy, scalloped thing’ (122). Animal death for Wood, then, becomes art, drawn from a broader spiritus mundi, an emptying of the animal signifier into absent referent.4 Meat preparation and eating becomes solace for Yolanda who feels that in preparing the skins ‘the wet raw gloves … became her pets’ and she finds a ‘hideous, sensuous pleasure … giving love, in this emulsion. Massaging tenderness and thanks to the small creatures through the inside of their skins’ (191). Yolanda embodies an atavistic zoolatry as redress to patriarchal modernity. But despite the complex freeing of animals from absent 288

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referentiality much of the novel conducts, this post-lingual conflation of human and animal borders on a carnist revelling in animal death. The naturalness of the trapping and meat is furthered in Teddy’s posturing of a vaguely vegan sensibility that is ridiculed within the text and subject to irony in the face of his own cruelty and complicity (79, 150). The girls are likened to animals in other pejorative parallels that trouble a clear exposition of the sexual politics of meat. Bird metaphors are central to the paradoxes Wood’s animal figurations present. While birds are locations of wonder, often literal agents separated from the madness of the Hardings’ confine, they also evoke alienation and madness. At the beginning of the text Yolanda’s perspective on the dislocation in the bush – that is, the likelihood that she is in an insane asylum – is focalised through the sound of kookaburras ‘loud and lunatic’ (3), and when the ‘shriek of a single white cockatoo … fills the room like murder’ (10). At first glance, this opening alienation from the bush is redeemed by Yolanda’s later absorption into the natural realm. But it is a bird as madness metaphor that is continued. In Yolanda’s thoughts, the girls are compared to hens, ready to peck and dismember Hetty (75). In an echo of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), to which the novel is often compared, the girls are forced to wear beak-like bonnets – enforcers of myopia, an extended conceit of the bird as madness. Yolanda’s ‘dreaming mind’ weaves together the night cries of birds and girls with the bonnets. She imagines them woven with ‘bones of dead birds … Sometimes Yolanda thought she was going mad’ (51; original emphasis). Later, insanity is symbolised through the animal when ridiculous nurse Nancy belittles Verla through crude zoomorphism, calling her a seahorse, a mantle Verla accepts: ‘Mad and pale and terrified’ (82). Madness as figured through animal imagery is most fully developed in Verla’s fever. At the point where Verla can fully perceive the other girls’ ugliness and cannot stand their laughter, she places her hands over her ears, small ‘like a baby rat’s claws’ (132). Her hallucinations from here are all zoomorphic. Verla hears rain as a swarm of bees or biblical locusts. She walks on animal feet, has a euphoric encounter with a herd of wild kangaroos, walks with her hand on her horse visitant and achieves a therianthropic autochthony in trout form (132–138). It is true that Verla’s delirious imaginings are an opportunity for Wood to embark on a psychological exploration of female freedom and begin a complex deconstruction of a sentimental projection onto animal subjects, and a critique of romantic animal visitant as redemption. But in so doing, animals are also pejorative signifiers of madness, emptied of their own individual specificity. To convey the maddened suspense Verla suffers after Boncer eats her plate of deathly mushrooms, the figural completely substitutes any mimesis: ‘a coloured lizard’s neck-frill flare and stiff and shrink flat, flare and shrink. The world is spinning through time, like a fast forward scene of evolution’ (286). Wood also employs the animal metaphor as signifier of sexualisation. Through Verla’s gaze, Hetty is described as ‘a little muscled dog that knew how to bite, and how to indiscriminately fuck. If she was a male the pink crayon of her dick would be always out’ (65). Verla feels she can see what the Cardinal, Hetty’s abuser, must have seen. This is an indictment on female complicity in the male gaze, but it is also a wholesale deployment of the kind of emptying of animal signification that Adams critiques. Dog here is sex, is brute. Hetty is repeatedly associated with animal, dreams of being a predator, sinking her teeth into a zebra (106–107). Again, the girls’ dialogue between the walled-off rooms of the ‘dog boxes’ connects this symbology with intense sexualisation. The animal as it is variously and excessively used by Wood is, then, both slippery metaphor and agential actuality. Wood’s novel exposes how patriarchy is dependent on animal referentiality. The language of objectification, consumption and fragmentation of the female body is bound to an animal referent. Further, Wood employs a complex deconstruction of romantic and sensual love that projects male desire onto both women and non-human entities but vacates them as subjects. Woman and animal are then voids into which androcentric desire is projected. Wood also crafts momentary glimpses of the animal subject, diluting the pervasiveness of the absent animal referent by making explicit 289

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the movement from subject to meat. Finally, The Natural Way of Things vexes human exceptionalism by acknowledging both human as killer and human as potentially meat: through Yolanda the human/animal boundary becomes utterly permeable. Yet, there are strong paradoxes in Wood’s deployment of the animal from a literary animal studies perspective. In order to ‘occupy’ the animal, Verla and Yolanda, as human subjects, must first vacate the animal and so objectify ‘it.’ The animal tilts back to pejorative symbol: for death, for madness and for sexualised object, while meat-eating is unquestioned as lifeforce rather than death. Wood’s critique of the intersections between speciesism and patriarchy, then, offers multiple entries into thinking through questions of literary language and metaphor in relation to animal cruelty in the Australian sphere. As a case, her challenging dystopian, peculiarly Australian, fiction presents both the possibilities and the representational traps of this terrain.

Notes 1 Frank Sinnett’s 1856 essay is, as Gelder and Weaver suggest, arguing for a reduction in these peculiarly Australian animal (and botanical) presences in order to evoke authentic Australian characters. 2 The text was inspired by the sufferings at the Hay Institution for Girls in the 1960s and the 1970s, where girls were drugged, taken to a decommissioned men’s prison in south western NSW and subject to psychological, physical and sexual violence to punish and blame girls for perceived sexual misconduct (Wood qtd in Wyndham). 3 The encounter with the kangaroo buck caught in the trap is one textual moment where the animal gaze is turned on the human subjects and questions of compassion are debated. 4 The Natural Way of Things began as the creative artefact accompanying Wood’s PhD in Creative Writing, where she explores methods for creative practice including ‘the need to “drop” into the subconscious mind’ (Wood, Looking for Trouble 43).

Works Cited Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 2010. Archer-Lean, Clare. ‘Revisiting the “Problem” of Anthropomorphism through Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014).’ Australian Literary Studies 34.1 (2019). . Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2008. Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. London: Vintage, 2003. Copeland, Marion W. ‘Literary Animal Studies in 2012: Where We Are Going.’ Anthrozoös 25.1 (2012): 91–105. Donovan, Josephine. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Dovey, Ceridwen. Only the Animals. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014. Falconer, Delia. ‘All Me Make the Roar: Animals in Australian Writing.’ Wheeler Centre: The Long View. Nd. . Fetherston, Rachel. ‘Greener Pastures and Tangled Gums: The Rise of Australian Eco-Fiction.’ Overland 7 Dec.  2016.  . Garrard Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2012. ———. ‘Ferality Tales.’ The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Ed. Greg Garrard. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 141–159. Gelder, Ken, and Rachael Weaver. Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2017. Goldsworthy, Peter. Wish. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 1995. Hornung, Eva. Dog Boy. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2009. Jenkins, Fiona. ‘Strange Kinships: Embodiment and Belief in JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.’ Australian Literary Studies 28.3 (2013): 15–27. Kaf ka, Franz. ‘A Report to an Academy.’ A Country Doctor. 1919. Prague: Vitalis Verlag, 2017. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman’s Poetry of the Body. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

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Animal Presence McKay, Robert. ‘What Kind of Literary Animal Studies Do We Want, Or Need?’ Modern Fiction Studies 60.3 (2014): 636–644. Mulcaire, Terry. ‘Intimacy in Leaves of Grass.’ ELH 60.2 (1993): 471–501. Neave, Lucy Ann. ‘The “Unimaginable Border” and Bear Life in Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy.’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54.2 (2019): 243–256. Osborn, Jennifer. ‘Review of The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood.’ Transnational Literature 8.2 (2016). . Parry, Catherine. Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2017. Paterson, Banjo. Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1917. Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Plumwood, Val. The Eye of the Crocodile. Canberra, ACT: Australian National UP, 2012. Sheridan, Susan. ‘Feminist Fables and Alexis Wright’s Art of the Fabulous in The Swan Book.’ Hecate 43.1/2 (2017): 197–214. Simons, John. Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002. Sinnett, Frederick. ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia.’ Illustrated Journal of Australasia Nov. 1856: 42–54. Sorenson, Rosemary. ‘Listen to the Sirens: The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood.’ Sydney Review of Books 2 Oct. 2015. . ‘Special Report: Clinton Accused.’ Washington Post 13 Sept. 1998. . Tiffin, Helen. ‘Animal Writes: Ethics, Experiments and Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish.’ Southerly 69.1 (2009): 36–56. Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010. Wood, Charlotte. Animal People. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2011. ———. Looking for Trouble: Problem-Finding in Literary Creativity. Unpublished PhD diss. U of New South Wales, 2015. ———. The Natural Way of Things. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2015. Wyndham, Susan. ‘The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood: A Novel Born from Anger: Dark Material Emerges When a Writer Decides to Go With Her Instincts.’ Sydney Morning Herald 22 Sept. 2015. .

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30 LANDSCAPE (AFTER MABO) Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

The term ‘landscape’ is essentially an aesthetic category, and it is almost impossible to separate the word from the visual arts – most particularly the art of painting. The word entered English at the end of the sixteenth century from the Middle Dutch word lantskap, which was generally used to refer to the painted backdrops in stage productions. In literature, the concept of landscape also maintains its scopic connotation, and tends to attach to settings and imagery that create a visual impression of natural or rural worlds. Nevertheless, while still in widespread popular use, the term is now seldom deployed in Australian literary criticism, though it did enjoy a period of prominence during the twentieth century, particularly in the assessment of poetry (see Wright, Preoccupations; Elliott). Yet, while the term ‘landscape’ has fallen into critical disfavour, the interest in land has not. The concept of landscape – insofar as it once designated a natural background – has become problematic partly because the natural has lost its unifying capacity (indeed its naturalness), and partly because we are no longer confident in separating the world into a priority of planes – foreground, middle-ground, background. Another way of saying this is to notice that, in Australia, nature has become highly politicised; or, more accurately, the political quality of nature has now become visible, rather than invisible. Within this paradigm shift, where once landscape was invoked to uphold the innocence and vitality of Australian nationhood, it is now often regarded as an encryption of settler colonial ideology. As Stephen Muecke puts it succinctly: ‘Aesthetics can be politics carried out by another means, for what one learns to value in landscape, indeed, what is included in the frame, enables the promotion of what is considered valuable and worthy as an object of aspiration’ (71). Despite such misgivings, the concept of landscape remains operative in any study of Australian literature, since it was a term that both writer and reader would have shared for much of its history, but particularly in the twentieth century. Even beyond that, landscape is still a term that, if its ideological freight can be acknowledged, can help emphasise the fact that once the natural world enters the imaginative domain of creative literature it is always to some degree a landscape – that is, a work of art.1

After Mabo One of the main ways that landscape has now become problematic in literary studies is that land in Australia is now recognised as being owned, and having always been owned, by its Indigenous peoples. The belated formal recognition of Indigenous landownership occurred with the High Court’s decision in the Mabo case in 1992, ratified in the 1996 Wik decision and given legislative form at both national and state levels in the years since. It would be wrong to conclude that before 292

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1992 land went uncontested in Australia, but this moment marked, to a large extent, the beginning of the end of plausible deniability when it came to Indigenous prior ownership. The effect of the Mabo decision in terms of how land gets imagined in Australian cultural production has been traced in a number of fields, first in cinema (Collins and Davis) and more recently in literature (Dolin; Rodoreda; Zavaglia). While Geoff Rodoreda and Liliana Zavaglia’s studies look in particular at the historical novels that have appeared in the wake of the Mabo decision and which became embroiled in the ‘history wars’ of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kieran Dolin’s work reaches back to texts before that decision to trace ambiguities in land and belonging that have taken on a new complexion in a post-Mabo Australia. After Mabo, it became much clearer that what was once a seemingly innocent term – landscape – now contained a number of hidden claims. In particular, it relied on a certain proprietary regard, in which landscape was the imaginative property of all Australians, to whom it belonged by virtue of being Australian: a kind of birthright, in other words. Paradoxically, this was true even when, as was often the case, the landscape was imagined as hostile, because this persecution complex was also a perverse claim to ownership – the land does not like me. This kind of direct imaginary identification (whether positive or negative) with the land functioned to exclude Indigenous ownership and sustained a poetics of terra nullius – a vast, empty, silent land beyond time and human history. These latter qualities, so it was felt, only arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, as was dramatised in Eleanor Dark’s celebrated historical novel, The Timeless Land (1941). But to understand how land and landscape have, in the wake of Mabo, started to come apart, it is necessary to revisit how they initially became joined. While the diverse peoples of the Australian continent had been living in and representing their land in multiform ways for tens of thousands of years, the arrival of European colonists brought with it a particular way of viewing land. Australia was colonised by the British in 1788, and the moment hovers between the overlapping paradigms of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Both of these modalities of thought were also attended by what Raymond Williams called structures of feeling. The hallmark of the enlightenment was an imagined scientific detachment which sought to understand the phenomenal world in terms of universal laws of nature. Romanticism, by contrast, introduced passionate subjectivity into the centre of its worldview. The pivot between the two modes is particularly prominent when it comes to the treatment of nature. For the Enlightenment, nature was a riddle to be solved through the scientific method. For Romanticism, nature was a spirit to be worshipped rather than a problem to be analysed. What characterises Romanticism is a more febrile emotional pitch, and, in particular, a more open identification of subjective states with the natural world – what came to be known as the ‘pathetic’ (or ‘romantic’) fallacy. The transition from an Enlightenment paradigm of detached contemplation to a Romantic paradigm of passionate identification is not something that can be neatly periodised. In many ways, it remains a structuring dialectic even today. Certainly, we see both impulses at play during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Europeans first began to depict the land of Australia, most particularly in the journals of exploration that were a source of both imperial intelligence and popular fascination. In the voyage of Captain James Cook which mapped the eastern coast of Australia and brought that portion of the continent to the knowledge of Europe, we see the Australian landscape depicted according to the scientific categories that prevailed in the 1760s and 1770s (Smith). But Cook also imported his own landscape aesthetic, noticing how the ‘the trees … appeared like plantations in a gentleman’s park’ (qtd in Elliott 16; Smith 133). Generally, though, early attempts to describe the Australian landscape foundered on an incompatibility between the aesthetics of landscape drawn from Europe and the actuality of Australian natural forms. Immediately prior to the Romantic period, there had emerged in England in the late eighteenth century a particular fashion for landscape tours, made popular by William Gilpin, and conceived under the banner and rubric of the picturesque (Hughes-d’Aeth, Paper Nation 45–57). The picturesque 293

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movement drew explicitly on the landscape traditions of painting, particularly Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, and schooled the spectator in appreciating particular formal compositions that occurred in the natural world. The discovery of such scenes or ‘pictures’ became the object of the picturesque tourist. This mode of spectatorship contained many of the ingredients – most particularly an attraction to the wild, ancient and idyllically rural – that would be integral to Romanticism proper. Broadly speaking, the Romantic view of landscape retained a picturesque stance insofar as it remained wedded to the concept of locating – typically discovering – a certain form of vista. What typifies the early attempts at describing Australian landscape is a certain kind of failure, in which the aesthetics of nature appreciation running from the picturesque and into Romanticism could not find adequate purchase in the world that these European colonists encountered in Australia. Justice Barron Field, in his Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales (1825), found the dominant Australian tree genus (Eucalyptus), with ‘its scanty tin-like foliage,’ to be singularly ‘unpicturesque,’ which in turn prevented the countryside more generally from being picturesque. While Field did freely concede that the flowers and shrubs of New South Wales were both beautiful and remarkable, he also felt that owing to the character of the trees, ‘there is not a single scene in it of which a painter could make a landscape’ (qtd in Elliott 17; Field 425). Finding the landscape ‘monotonous’ became a staple response to the natural vistas of Australia, in spite of the fact that Australian ecosystems are among the most biodiverse on the planet. When the system of judgement (European landscape aesthetics) came up against phenomena with which it was incommensurate (the land- and life-forms of Australia), the initial response was to find lack in the latter rather than the former. In this way, Australia was depicted as a landscape of lack, and these perceived absences blinded the colonisers from the natural plenitudes that did exist in Australia. At the level of affect, these perceived lacks were most often registered as melancholy, in which the landscape was found to be ‘mournful’ or ‘funereal’ or ‘desolate.’

The Poetics of Terra Nullius Early colonial poetry can be seen as an attempt to work against the prejudicial view of Australian nature that functioned as the default position. Figures such as William Charles Wentworth, Charles Harpur, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall, in their various ways, mounted defences of the Australian landscape simply by making it the subject of their poetry. Wentworth, who was born while his parents were anchored off Norfolk Island in 1790 as part of the Second Fleet, had come to prominence in 1813 as a member of the first party of colonists to successfully cross the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. The sheer cliffs of these mountains had confined settlement to the coastal plain for a quarter of a century and the path across the Blue Mountains opened the Bathurst plains for agricultural settlement and the interior of New South Wales more generally. Wentworth’s poem, ‘Australasia’ (1823), which he submitted to a poetry competition while studying at Cambridge University, shows how closely landscape and colonisation are related in the early history of Australia. Wentworth uses the poem to recount the moment when his party beheld the future of agricultural conquest in the plains beyond the dividing range: The hidden key that opes thy treasury; How mute, how desolate thy stunted woods, How dread the chasms, where many an eagle broods, How dark thy caves, how lone thy torrents roar, As down thy cliffs precipitous they pour, Broke on our hearts, when first with vent’rous tread We dared to rouse thee from thy mountain bed! Till gain’d with toilsome step thy topmost heath,

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Landscape (After Mabo) We spied the cheering smokes ascend beneath, And, as a meteor shoots athwart the night, The boundless champaign burst upon our sight, Till nearer seen the beauteous landscape grew. Op’ning like Canaan on rapt Israel’s view. (lines 247–259)

In Wentworth’s poem, the Blue Mountains and its steep valleys are characterised as ‘mute,’ ‘stunted,’ ‘desolate,’ ‘dread,’ ‘dark,’ ‘lone’ – even the eagle ‘broods.’ When the word ‘landscape’ does appear, it is on the other side of these mountains, with the Bathurst plains emerging as the promised land (‘Op’ning like Canaan on rapt Israel’s view’). Significantly, the ‘cheering smokes’ on the plains beyond the mountains are also the signal that they are already occupied. In the early colonial period, Aboriginal people are often present in landscape depictions as a trace. Aboriginal people decorate the foreground, for instance, of the topographical paintings of Joseph Lycett (1774–1828) and Thomas Watling (1762–1814), adding a ‘picturesque’ element that was thought to be otherwise lacking (Dixon 47–78). This usage of ‘natives’ had actually been prefigured within the picturesque tradition by the depiction of rustic European villagers, who gave a human historical complexion to the natural splendour they helped to frame. But, however ‘beauteous’ the landscape of the plains may have been, it was the mountains that were found to be the more picturesque, in the sense that they became the depicted subject of nineteenth-century landscape poetry. Indeed, Wentworth’s poem is a harbinger of the lyric landscape poetry that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century New South Wales, particularly in the work of Harpur and Kendall. With them, the ‘hidden’ river valleys of the Dividing Range became the privileged poetic landscape. Like Wentworth, these poets focused on what they found to be a brooding stillness in the landscape. Harpur’s poem, ‘Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest’ (1851) begins as follows: Not a bird disturbs the air, There is quiet everywhere; Over plains and over woods. What a mighty stillness broods. (lines 1–4)

The scene is one of a landscape asleep; indeed, the words in the poem are like a thesaurus entry for the word ‘sleep,’ as if the land’s most natural state was a deep noontime stupor. Only the trickling ‘rill’ (line 30) is audible in the midst of this ‘vast and slumbrous’ silence (line 12). Similarly, in Kendall’s most famous poem, ‘Bell-birds’ (1867), the birdsong gains its piquancy by emerging out of a landscape of generalised silence: By channels of coolness the echoes are calling, And down the dim gorges I hear the creek falling; It lives in the mountain, where moss and the sedges Touch with their beauty the banks and the ledges; Through brakes of the cedar and sycamore bowers Struggles the light that is love to the flowers. And, softer than slumber, and sweeter than singing, The notes of the bell-birds are running and ringing. (lines 1–8)

This sleeping landscape is one which is only woken by colonisation, and it is in this way that the colonial landscape, insofar as it emerged in poetry and in the more poetic moments of prose description, was entwined with the politics of settlement. This eerily still or uncannily stupefied landscape is a key element in the poetics of terra nullius and is one that continued to be influential in the way that Australian landscapes were rendered. It 295

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was first theorised by Marcus Clarke, who named it ‘weird melancholy’ noticing how it typified the oil paintings that Louis Buvelot and Eugene von Guerard were producing in the 1870s and, less convincingly, Gordon’s poems (Clarke, ‘Preface’ 190). Clarke gave his own shape to this quality in the memorable gothic landscape descriptions in his Tasmanian convict novel, His Natural Life (1870–1872). What Clarke put his finger on was that there had been a category mistake in previous attempts to find an appropriate aesthetic modality for the Australian landscape. Australian landscape (if we allow this slightly absurd totalisation) was not picturesque, said Clarke, it was sublime. The sublime, defined against both the beautiful and the picturesque by the philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797), was a way of capturing the overwhelming quality of certain natural environments – vast chasms, thunderous waterfalls, terrifying mountain peaks. In this sense, we can draw parallels between Clarke’s isolation of the colonial sublime with the kinds of descriptions that Henry David Thoreau had made of his travels in the Maine Woods.

Landscape and Literary Nationalism In the decades before and after Australian Federation in 1901, landscape began to acquire a more openly ‘national’ quality, as well as to be increasingly captured by an emerging rural realism in prose fiction. But the Romantic mode still prevailed in poetry, and the tradition of the nature lyric developed by Harpur, Kendall and Gordon is clearly visible in the work of A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson. Gordon’s equestrian fascination is particularly evident in Paterson’s venerated poem, ‘The Man from Snowy River,’ which was dutifully memorised by generations of Australian schoolchildren. First published in The Bulletin in April 1890, it is a typical poem of the Bulletin school in that it is a ballad – with the rhyme and rhythm of sung poetry. It tells the story of a valuable horse that has escaped into the bush and joined the ‘wild bush horses’ (line 3) there. The owner of the farm has gathered together a group of men to ride out and bring in the brumbies and among these riders is the figure in the title of the poem – ‘the man from Snowy River.’ What the poem demonstrates is that, by the 1890s, the qualities that had once been projected onto the background of the landscape were now able to reoccupy the foreground of a representative figure. In fact, the whole poem functions via metonyms; that is, through comparisons based on contiguity. The Man: the Horse: the Snowy River – it is not quite clear who is ultimately acting in the poem. By the end of the nineteenth century, the bushman (and he was a man) erupts as a personification of the abstract qualities that the landscape had embodied – taciturn, sullen, suffering, withdrawn, somehow beyond reach. The wiry, mute Man from Snowy River is thus an extension of the ‘mute … stunted woods’ that Wentworth had described in his poem ‘Australasia.’ The vision of landscape as a realm of rollicking adventure which emerges in ‘The Man from Snowy River’ had another source within the Australian literary tradition: the squatter novels that began to appear from the mid-1840s (Gelder and Weaver 29–51). Indeed, the station in Paterson’s poem is the distillation of the quasi-aristocratic estates that wool, and then cattle, ranches (called ‘runs’ or ‘stations’ in Australia) were imagined to be. In this sense, pastoral capitalism merely seemed to bring to fruition the ‘gentleman’s park[s]’ that Cook had seen in 1770. Yet this very landscape, an open pasture interspersed with trees, but free of entangling understoreys, has in recent years been the subject of another branch of scholarship which has a distinctly post-Mabo quality (Gammage; Pascoe). What scholars now argue was that far from being a sleeping landscape, devoid of time or action, this open country was the result of assiduous land management practice by generations of Aboriginal people, particularly their use of fire. As the land has fallen increasingly into ruin since colonisation, there has been an emerging interest in the methods used by Indigenous Australia to live sustainably. The post-Mabo ‘landscape’ is thus no longer a natural one, but one significantly shaped by human intervention. Indeed, the ‘cheering smokes’ on the plains that Wentworth described in ‘Australasia’ are, more than likely, the signs of the fire-stick 296

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farming that Aboriginal people used to develop the pastures that allowed them to move and hunt freely on the land, as well as to grow the crops they used to sustain themselves (Pascoe 19–52). It was these ready-made pastures that Australian pastoralists seized for their introduced herds. The landscape that acted as the stage for manly action in Paterson’s poetry nevertheless also retained the negative qualities that it had acquired since the earliest European colonists recorded their impressions. In a famously staged literary ‘debate,’ Paterson and Henry Lawson put their different versions of the Australian ‘bush’ in the pages of the Bulletin. Against Paterson’s sunny account of life in the bush, Lawson’s grim, comic realism disclosed a world of poverty and alienation. It was still a landscape of lack, but the forms this lack took were humbler and more human. ‘Draw a wire fence and few ragged gums,’ wrote Lawson, ‘and add some scattered sheep running away from the train. Then you’ll have the bush all along the New South Wales Western line from Bathurst on’ (‘In a Dry Season’ 276). This off hand dismissal of the state’s agricultural heartland was typical of Lawson’s bitterly iconoclastic prose style. His poetry struck a jauntier note, but the message was the same: Miles and miles of thirsty gutters – strings of muddy water-holes In the place of ‘shining rivers’ – ‘walled by cliffs and forest boles.’ … Bush! where there is no horizon! where the buried bushman sees Nothing – Nothing! but the sameness of the ragged, stunted trees! (‘Up the Country’ lines 17–20)

What Lawson (and Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin, Steele Rudd and Bulletin realism more generally) exhibits is an ironised landscape that subverts the claims of an earlier Romantic mode, and yet simultaneously lays claim to some sharper, truer essence within. It corresponds to the emergence of a plein air school of Impressionist painting (Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Tom Roberts) in which the true character (as it was thought) of Australian landscape was freed from European Romantic gloom once and for all. Lawson was also notable in his sensitivity to the lives of women: his jeremiad of the western plains, ‘Up the Country’ (1892), saves a verse for their plight, noting the western districts were a ‘[l]and where gaunt and haggard women live alone and work like men, / Till their husbands, gone a-droving, will return to them again’ (lines 38–39). The fact that landscape could be gendered – that it meant different things to men and women based on their gender – was also something that started to become visible in the 1890s when Barbara Baynton began to publish her stories in the Bulletin. Instead of the bush as a place of escape, the bush became a place of female imprisonment, a gothic landscape of sexual threat.

The Modernist Synthesis In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the discipline of anthropology began to take more seriously the cultural complexity of Indigenous Australia. Allied to the possibilities offered by increasingly mobile forms of photography, ethnographic expeditions began to make known the very particular ways that Indigenous Australians related to the land that sustained them. At the popular level, this interest manifested as Aboriginalism, a form of primitivism that saw Aboriginal motifs work their way not just into art (for instance, Margaret Preston) and literature, but into home décor and furnishings. In the 1920s and 1930s, the fact that Aboriginal people had a special connection to the country had begun to be envied and might even be emulated by the colonising population. An early advocate of this position was P.R. Stephensen, who saw connection to the ‘spirit’ of the land as being, among other things, a key grounding (or ‘foundation’) of Australian identity. This concept was also behind the nativist literary movements in the late 1930s centred around the Meanjin Papers (in Brisbane) and the Jindyworobak Anthologies (in Adelaide). 297

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During the Second World War, the fact that the British Empire could no longer guarantee Australian security was made painfully clear, and this gave further impetus to nativist cultural impulses. The period immediately after the war was one of considerable activity in the literary sphere and literary landscape writing began to inch away from the bush nationalism of the Bulletin school. There was, for instance, an increasing attention paid to the ecological structures that went into the natural forms that are apprehended as landscape. The same mountain landscapes that had been celebrated by Harpur, Kendall and Paterson were the subject of a series of books by Elyne Mitchell. Her books were still broadly speaking Romantic accounts of mountain landscapes, but they started to introduce an ecological sensibility and particularity into their appreciation of Australia’s alpine regions. More radically, in 1946, Judith Wright published her first volume of poetry, The Moving Image. Wright had initially been drawn to the Jindyworobak coterie and her poetry shared the metaphysical investment in land and country that was at the heart of that movement. But Wright drew back from the naïve, and indeed grossly appropriative quality, of Jindyworobak Aboriginalism. In its place, Wright’s New England poems introduced a landscape that was haunted by deep losses. The losses that Wright’s poetry traced were threefold. First, there was the violent destruction of Aboriginal culture, including the massacres perpetrated in the pioneering period. These killers were not abstract figures from history, but her ancestors, and her acknowledgement of this intimate violence was and remains scandalous. Second, there was the ecological destruction that was encapsulated most clearly in the erosion of soil in the once-fertile high country of New England. Third, there was the end of the pastoral dream itself, which had been the cause of the other two losses, and which was now facing a very uncertain future in a land it had destroyed. This complex inheritance was given shape in Wright’s palimpsestic landscapes: South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country, rises that tableland, high delicate outline of bony slopes wincing under the winter, low trees blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite – clean, lean, hungry country. (‘South of My Days’ lines 1–5)

In ‘South of My Days,’ what is strikingly original is the quality of agedness that the landscape wears. Until Wright, the landscape was either ineffably young (a youthful, virginal country), or shrouded in a misty ancientness. Wright’s New England landscape is in late middle age – its scars visible, its tragedies remembered. Instead of a landscape that screened off colonisation from itself, Wright’s landscape directly expressed the reality of the colonial situation. The paddocks are shot, the creeks eroded or ‘willow-choked’ (line 6), the crops have turned to dust: This sick dust, spiralling with the wind, is harsh as grief ’s taste in our mouths and has eclipsed the small sun. The remnant earth turns evil, the steel-shocked earth has turned against the plough and runs with wind all day, and all night sighs in our sleep against the windowpane. (‘Dust’ lines 1–7)

This dust – wind-borne topsoil – connects directly to a colonial madness or blood-lust, which is graphically depicted in ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’: ‘Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers, / and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?’ (lines 16–17). Another important development in the 1940s was the publication of the ‘Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone’ from the Wonguri-Mandjigai people of north-eastern Arnhem land. Translated by the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt, the song cycle was published in the anthropological journal Oceania in 1948. Whereas before this point, Aboriginal stories had generally been 298

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rendered in the naïve style of children’s fairy tales (although David Unaipon drew his style from John Milton and John Bunyan), the Berndts’s translation adopted a compact modernist diction that allowed the rhythms and repetitions of the oral mode to come through. It produced a signal moment in the history of Australian literary landscape writing that was as epochal, in its own way, as the dot paintings of Papunya Tula (Jose, ‘The Story of the Moonbone’). Before this point, the habit was to see traditional Aboriginal people as children of nature, who had no particular regard for nature because they were (it was imagined) coterminous with it (‘Untutor’d children, fresh from Nature’s / mould,’ as Wentworth’s ‘Australasia’ has it [line 83]). The publication of the song cycle transformed these guileless children into Homeric figures – still romanticised, undoubtedly, but imbued with the capacity for representing themselves, their actions, their world and their history in the highest registers of ‘literary’ language. More radically, the interpenetrating similes of the song cycle shattered the priority of ‘grounds’ (fore, middle, back) on which landscape in the European tradition depended: They are sitting about in the camp, among the branches, along the back of the camp: Sitting along in lines in the camp, there in the shade of the paperbark trees: Sitting along in a line, like the new white spreading clouds; In the shade of the paperbarks, they are sitting resting like clouds. People of the clouds, living there like the mist; like the mist sitting resting with arms on knees, In here towards the shade, in this Place, in the shadow of paperbarks. Sitting there in rows, those Wonguri-Mandjigai people, paperbarks along like a cloud. (‘Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone’ lines 1–7)

The Berndts translated the song into English, but the result was something other than English. The heavily prepositional syntax, its hypnotic redundancy of phrase, its leitmotifs and cathected figures (paperbarks, cloud, mist) defiantly escape the destination language. Whatever might be said of the vicissitudes of translation, the song cycle presented an alterity that remained finally resistant to assimilation. Just as the Papunya paintings scandalised Europeans into an experience of their own otherness, the songs of the Wonguri-Mandjigai people made clear, and yet somehow fatally compromised, the distinction between seeing landscape and being in country. The kind of landscapes that appeared in Wright’s poetry, and then in the novels of Randolph Stow and Patrick White, are indicative of a synthesis that occurred under the rubric of literary modernism between landscape as it had been reified in the Bulletin school – what White famously disparaged as the ‘dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’ (qtd in Webby) – and the appreciation of Aboriginal difference that anthropologists had helped introduce into the consciousness of non-Aboriginal Australia. In some ways, we might regard the particular forms of alienation traced in these authors as a continuation of the estrangement that had been expressed in the earlier colonial writers, but what had changed was the fact that the land (now seen as owned and inhabited by an Aboriginal other) was suddenly looking back. In the earlier tradition, the landscape was judged and found wanting; in the modernist sensibility of the post-war years, the landscape was now judge and it was the colonising subjects who were found wanting. The seething bush in White’s Tree of Man (1955) possesses a vitality and dynamism that often eludes the hapless human intruders, and the figure of the lost colonial is the defining motif of other great novels like Voss (1957) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976). In these latter works, the landscape is not so much malevolent as deeply indifferent. In the Geraldton novels of Stow, one is faced with scions of a pastoral generation whose coordinates have disappeared – again, the landscape functions as a litmus paper for this alienation (Hughes-d’Aeth, ‘Farm Novel or Station Romance?’).

Country But as non-Aboriginal Australia undertook a revaluation of the concept of land that fundamentally disrupted the once stable category of landscape, Aboriginal Australia was forcing itself into 299

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the public sphere. As is often the case with landscape, it is helpful to turn to the visual arts to help corroborate and signal certain key changes. In painting, for instance, the contrast between residual and emergent views (held by non-Aboriginal Australia) of Aboriginal cosmology is dramatically distilled in two remarkable cross-cultural moments: the watercolour painters of Hermannsburg (most famously Albert Namatjira) and the Papunya Tula collective, whose artists inaugurated the practice of acrylic ‘dot painting’ that became the foundation of contemporary Indigenous art. Just ten years and 150 kilometres apart, Hermannsburg and Papunya appeared to exemplify the shift in Australian Aboriginal policy from assimilation to self-determination. In other words, they gave graphic shape to a political change, and it is no coincidence that the artistic basis of both schools was the land itself. In one, it was thought, the land appeared in the European idiom of realist landscape art incorporating the perspectival system; in the other, the land was represented in a radically symbolic form, but according to a symbolic system in which Europeans were utterly unschooled. The dot paintings were representational of place and figure but without recourse to visual realism, and where, for instance, multiple points of apprehension could be sustained in a single work. Stephen Muecke has described this challenge to the category of landscape that Aboriginal painting in the 1970s and 1980s in terms of ‘distance’ and ‘relatedness,’ noting that Aboriginal paintings of country have defied description by the term ‘landscape,’ despite being paintings the subject matter of which is country. The strength of Aboriginal relatedness to country stands over and against the imposition of distance assumed by the European tradition of painting the land. (67) The duality between Hermannsburg and Papunya is, of course, tendentious in its own way and does a disservice to the estrangement that Namatjira’s genius – particularly his sense of colour – caused in the 1950s. Nevertheless, Papunya Tula was a Rosetta-stone moment where Australians raised within European traditions began to experience, many for the first time, a radically different apprehension of country. Instead of an art that embodied looking at landscape, here was an art that embodied being in country – a land without landscape (Muecke 71–77). As we have seen in ‘Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone,’ a similar process did work its way through the literary sphere, but the upheaval of landscape by Indigenous worldviews is a little bit more difficult to trace in literature, because it is a mode where the sheer fact of literacy (having a language which exists in the form of writing) conditions its existence. (By contrast, there was a strong visual art tradition in Central Australia in body painting, sand art, rock art, carving and weaving.) In literature, conceived as phonetic writing, the first impingements of Aboriginal understanding of land occurred at places of cross-cultural contact, where Aboriginal people were becoming literate, often out of political necessity. Like Hermannsburg and Papunya, Coranderrk Mission in Central Victoria precipitated, against a backdrop of profound adversity, a period of creative contact which demonstrated the distinctive cross-cultural capacity of Aboriginal people (Nanni and James). For them writing about land was, as has been argued was the case for Namatjira, an assertion of their ownership. This, in fact, mirrors the critique of landscape that the form is inherently proprietorial. When a generation of Aboriginal intellectuals emerged in the post-war period, a process which reached a climax in the 1967 citizenship referendum, there was some consternation in traditional literary quarters. In particular, when writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Jack Davis began to publish poetry and plays, some were taken aback that they spoke neither in the Homeric intonations of the Berndts’s translations of Arnhem Land epics, nor in the high lyric style of Australian poetic modernism – but in a blatantly political voice. The poetry of Oodgeroo and Davis did not constitute the kind of seemingly safe middle-ground that Namatjira’s watercolours had provided

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1950s Australia. There was, in fact, very little landscape in their poetry (or Davis’s realist plays), and what there was seemed almost schematic or hackneyed. The category mistake, however, was not on the side of Oodgeroo and Davis, who knew exactly what they were doing, but in a broader assimilationist sensibility in Australian society which had set aside a limited number of scripts for the kind of Aboriginality it wanted performed.

Mackellar Revisited The generation of Indigenous writers that followed Oodgeroo and Davis, particularly the novelists Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, have written works which do very much involve relationships to land. Scott’s work loops through the traditional country of the south coast of Western Australia. In his novel Taboo (2017), for instance, the remnant bushland of the wheatbelt and the Great Southern comes alive at various moments in ways that invoke its animistic place within Noongar cosmology. Similarly, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) memorably captures the extremes of weather and the complex tropical savannah of the Gulf country, and such forces and patterns carry the agency of Country, conceived of as an embracing cosmos. Both of these works are what Rodoreda calls ‘Sovereignty Novels’ (165) and in this context descriptions that might once have been called ‘landscape’ are now seen as assertions of the simple fact that the human world sits within a deeper matrix of animated life. Thus, the difference between the landscapes of Carpentaria and those of its key non-Aboriginal intertext, Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1938), lies primarily in what the Native Title Act called ‘connection to the land’ held by consequence of ‘traditional laws … and customs’ (s223). The difference is subtle and one cannot rule out the possibility that we might be imputing at least a part of it. This is another way in which landscape can be seen to have changed and become more visibly subjectivised and politicised in the contemporary context. In his seminal study of landscape and poetry in Australia, Brian Elliott begins with a meditation on Dorothea Mackellar’s iconic poem, ‘My Country’ (1908). The first four lines of its second verse are, even today, lodged firmly in cultural memory, resurrected by journalists with monotonous regularity anytime there is a drought, fire or flood. They have indeed taken on an unanticipated valence in the era of human-induced climate change: I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains. (lines 9–12)

Elliott notes that by the time the poem appeared in the early 1900s, all of the epithets and images were already available to a poet like Mackellar – who, after all, wrote the poem while living in London. He notices how the poem uses landscape to bind (that is, interpellate) its readers into a national idea, to call out, as he puts it, to ‘the native Australian heart’: What the poet is saying is that the purely Australian kind of landscape beauty is unique and accessible, in all its perfection, only to the native Australian heart. No one who has not learned to love this landscape – or these landscapes, so fiercely contrasted – from early childhood can ever understand them in depth. The rest of the world may fail altogether to respond to the Australian kind of beauty: All you who have not loved her, You will not understand. (Elliott 2; concluding with quotation from ‘My Country’ lines 42–43)

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Elliott was quite correct in his analysis of the poem; landscape did indeed offer itself through Mackellar’s verses as the imagery of national identification. However, while the poem had sought, in conventional nationalistic terms, to separate a ‘native’ sensibility from a foreign one incapable of apprehending its particular power and beauty, Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ now finds itself in the position of being the foreigner it denigrates. This is the kind of inversion that takes place in landscape in the post-Mabo epoch. The issue is thrown into relief by Alison Whittaker’s rewriting of ‘My Country’ in her poem ‘A Love Like Dorothea’s’ (Blakwork 5–7). Whittaker’s poem originally appeared as one of twelve commissioned responses to Mackellar’s poem in a 2017 issue of Australian Poetry Journal. Whittaker’s poem keeps certain rhythmic and imagistic echoes from Mackellar’s poem but splays them out into new series of associations: ‘I love a sunburnt country’ I loved a sunburnt country. I love white nativity. (lines 9–10)

The repetition of Mackellar’s original sonorous declaration in the past tense dislodges it from the dreamtime of nationalism into the specific historicity of the colonial event, before unmasking Mackellar’s poem for what it really is: a paean to ‘white nativity.’ The poem’s ‘love’ (that is, a ‘love like Dorothea’s’) is stripped of its innocence, since it is ‘the love that swept those sweeping plains from Nan, from Mum, from me’ (line 12). The verbs of Mackellar’s poem, which had resounded with nature’s sublimity, are shifted by Whittaker into the historical sublime of genocide. In the process, Whittaker’s poem restores the human agency which Mackellar’s nationalist mysticism obfuscates. Thus, the ‘sweeping plains’ become plains that have been ‘swept’ clean of Indigenous people. The ‘droughts’ and ‘sunburnt country’ are not, in Whittaker’s rereading, bold assertions of national amplitude, but a distinctly non-natural ‘furnace’ (line 14), a holocaust that has immolated her people’s culture. Whittaker’s reworking of Mackellar’s canonical poem is especially instructive for the status of landscape in post-Mabo Australia. What it shows is that landscape has fallen out of the cradle of its own carefully confected naivety. Landscape still exists inasmuch as people still talk of ‘the landscape’ and critics might still have recourse to the concept when they wish to highlight descriptions of country in literary works, but the term now exists in quotation marks, and within a field of contested ownership.

Note 1 Permission to quote from Judith Wright’s poetry in this chapter provided by HarperCollins Australia.

Works Cited Baynton, Barbara. Bush Studies (1902). Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2004. Berndt, Ronald. ‘WƆnguri-‘Mandʒikai Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone.’ Oceania 19.1 (1948): 16–50. Clarke, Marcus. For the Term of His Natural Life. 1870–72. Melbourne. VIC: Text, 2016. ———. ‘Preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Sea Spray and Smoke Drift.’ 1876. Jose, Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. 188–191. Collins, Felicity, and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge UP, 2004. Commonwealth of Australia. Native Title Act 1993. No. 110, 1993. . Dark, Eleanor. The Timeless Land. New York: Macmillan, 1941. Dixon, Robert. The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales, 1788–1860. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1986. Dolin, Kieran. ‘Place and Property in Post-Mabo Fiction by Dorothy Hewett, Alex Miller and Andrew McGahan.’ JASAL 14.3 (2014). . Elliott, Brian. The Landscape of Australian Poetry. Melbourne, VIC: Cheshire, 1967.

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Landscape (After Mabo) Field, Barron. Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales. London: John Murray, 1825. Fitch, Toby, ed. ‘Transforming My Country: A Selection of Poems Responding to Dorothea Mackellar’s “My Country.”’ Australian Poetry Journal 7.1 (2017): 90–118. Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2011. Gelder, Ken, and Rachael Weaver. Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy. Sydney, NSW: Sydney UP, 2017. Harpur, Charles. ‘Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest.’ 1851. Jose, Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. 101–102. Herbert, Xavier. Capricornia. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1938. Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony. Paper Nation: The Story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, 1886–1888. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2001. ———. ‘Farm Novel or Station Romance? The Geraldton Novels of Randolph Stow.’ JASAL 18.1 (2018). . Jose, Nicholas. ‘The Story of the Moonbone.’ Westerly 65.1 (2020) 22–57. ———. gen. ed. Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2009. Kendall, Henry. ‘Bell-birds.’ 1867. Jose, Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. 148–149. Lawson, Henry. ‘In a Dry Season.’ 1896. Jose, Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. 276–278. ———. ‘Up the Country.’ In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1900. 137–141. Mackellar, Dorothea. ‘My Country.’ 1908. Australian Poetry Since 1788. Ed. Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2011. 224–225. Muecke, Stephen. Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2004. Nanni, Giordano, and Andrea James. Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies, 2013. Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome, WA: Magabala, 2014. Paterson, Andrew Barton. ‘The Man from Snowy River.’ 1890. Jose, The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. 256–248. Rodoreda, Geoff. The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017. Scott, Kim. Taboo. Sydney, NSW: Pan Macmillan, 2017. Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1960. Webby, Elizabeth. ‘Patrick Victor (Paddy) White.’ Australian Dictionary of Biography. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2012. . Wentworth, William Charles. ‘Australasia.’ Sydney Gazette, and New South Wales Advertiser 25 Mar. 1824: 4. White, Patrick. The Tree of Man. New York: Viking, 1955. ———. Voss. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1957. ———. ‘The Prodigal Son.’ Australian Letters 1.3 (1958): 37–40. ———. A Fringe of Leaves. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976. Whittaker, Alison. Blakwork. Broome, WA: Magabala, 2018. Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria. Sydney, NSW: Giramondo, 2006. Wright, Judith. The Moving Image. Brisbane, QLD: Meanjin, 1946. ———. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1965. Zavaglia, Liliana. White Apology and Apologia: Australian Novels of Reconciliation. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2016.

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31 ‘THE EXTRAORDINARY BEHIND THE ORDINARY’ A Brief History of Australian Suburban Literature Nathanael O’Reilly Suburban life has been the subject of Australian literature since the 1840s.1 More than 170 years since the publication of the first works of Australian literature set in the suburbs, suburban literature is established, acclaimed and thriving. However, despite the fact that Australia has been the most suburban nation since the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of Australian literature has been set outside the suburbs, with Australian writers favouring the city and the bush as the locations for literary works since colonisation in 1788 up until the twenty-first century. 2 Readers searching for Australian literature set in the suburbs will find few works published before 1950. The number of published texts with a suburban setting increased between 1950 and 2000, when writers such as Patrick White, George Johnston, Barbara Hanrahan, David Malouf, Dorothy Hewett, Elizabeth Harrower, Helen Garner, Gerald Murnane, Jessica Anderson, Peter Carey, Tim Winton and Christos Tsiolkas all used the suburbs as the setting for major works.3 Australian suburban literature has flourished during the first two decades of the twenty-first century as writers have focused on the great variety of suburban experiences and the importance of the suburbs in contemporary Australian society, publishing works set in a multitude of suburban spaces located in cities around Australia, including suburbs that can be described as inner, outer, working-class, affluent, exclusive, disadvantaged, gentrifying, decaying, evolving, established, newly developed, multicultural and homogenous. The contemporary prominence of Australian suburban literature is to a large extent the result of the work of writers, editors, writing groups and publishers from the suburbs of Western Sydney, including Lachlan Brown, Felicity Castagna, Fiona Wright, Luke Carman, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Omar Sakr, Peter Polites, Sweatshop, the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University, and the Giramondo Publishing Company. Additionally, scholars such as Andrew McCann, Robin Gerster, Garry Kinnane, Nicholas Birns, Bernadette Brennan, Robert Dixon, Belinda Burns and Brigid Rooney have produced insightful and influential works of criticism focusing on suburban literature, demonstrating its significance. Rooney’s Suburban Space, The Novel and Australian Modernity (2018) provides a powerful, convincing, wide-ranging and insightful argument for the significance and centrality of suburban literature within the broader field of Australian literary studies. Although Australian writers, literary critics and scholars have ignored, disparaged and mocked suburbia for most of the past two centuries, largely due to the dominance of the anti-suburban tradition, the centrality, significance and importance of the suburbs have been recognised in the early twenty-first century by an increasing number of writers, readers, publishers, critics, scholars and judges of literary awards.

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Before providing an overview of important examples of Australian suburban literature, and then discussing contemporary suburban texts by Brown and Castagna, it is necessary to define the terms ‘suburb,’ ‘suburbia’ and ‘suburban.’ The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines a suburb as ‘those residential parts belonging to a town or city that lie immediately outside and adjacent to its walls or boundaries’ and as ‘[a]ny of such residential parts, having a definite designation, boundary, or organisation.’ In Australia, the word ‘suburb’ refers to a specific, defined, primarily residential area outside of the city’s central business district (CBD). In cities such as Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, there is a great deal of variation from suburb to suburb with regard to population, geographic size, age, distance from the CBD, population density, property size and value, and demographic composition, and therefore it would be misleading to refer to a ‘typical Australian suburb.’ Due to the great diversity of suburbs in Australia, it is useful to use terms just noted, such as inner, outer, middle-class, and so on, to refer to individual suburbs or groups of suburbs. The OED defines ‘suburbia’ as ‘[a] quasi-proper name’ for the suburbs that is often disparaging. ‘Suburbia’ can be a problematic label, as it not only frequently conveys negative connotations, but can erase difference, complexity, heterogeneity, and variety. Finally, the OED defines ‘suburban’ as ‘[o]f or belonging to a suburb or the suburbs of a town; living, situated, operating, or carried on in the suburbs’ and as ‘[h]aving characteristics that are regarded as belonging especially to life in the suburbs of a city; having the inferior manners, the narrowness of view, etc., attributed to residents in suburbs.’ Although the term ‘suburban’ can have negative connotations, it is also often used neutrally, and thus I use the term ‘suburban literature’ to refer to literary works that are set in the suburbs and engage with the complexities of suburban life, and no negative connotations are intended. The negative connotations of the terms ‘suburbia’ and ‘suburban’ have been present in Australia since colonisation in 1788 as they are central to the anti-suburban intellectual tradition, which was imported from Britain and remains influential in Western societies. The anti-suburban tradition was particularly strong in the early twentieth century in Australia, as well as during the 1950s and 1960s.4 Thus, the majority of the works of suburban literature published in Australia before the 1970s contained powerful anti-suburban critiques. One of the most notorious anti-suburban critiques was delivered by Louis Esson in 1912; he declared, [t]he suburban home must be destroyed. It stands for all that is dull and depressing in modern life. It endeavours to eliminate the element of danger in human affairs. But without dangers there can be no joy, no ecstasy, no spiritual adventures. The suburban home is a blasphemy. It denies life. (73) Esson’s equation of suburbia with boredom, domesticity, conservatism, depression, safety, repression and predictability has been repeated by Australian writers, critics and public intellectuals for more than a century, and his characterisation of suburbia will be recognisable to anyone familiar with a range of Australian cultural productions, whether fiction, poetry, drama, film or television. The anti-suburban tradition in Australian literature remained dominant at least until the 1990s, and anti-suburban critiques can still be found in early twenty-first-century Australian literary texts, such as Tsiolkas’s The Slap (2008), although contemporary critiques tend to be tempered by ambivalent and celebratory depictions of suburbia within the same texts. White, Australia’s only recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was considered for many decades to be an anti-suburban writer. White’s novels Riders in the Chariot (1961) and The Solid Mandala (1966) have been described as classic examples of anti-suburban literature. In Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel (2012), the first book-length study of Australian suburban literature, I devote two chapters to an analysis of White’s aforementioned novels, demonstrating that White and his

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work were erroneously labelled anti-suburban, arguing that White’s representations of suburbia are more nuanced and ambivalent than critics have acknowledged, and that the novels contain numerous passages celebrating suburbia. I contend that the anti-suburban tradition in Australian fiction was established by George Johnston’s classic novel My Brother Jack (1964) and then perpetuated by subsequent canonical works, especially Malouf ’s Johnno (1975) and Winton’s Cloudstreet (1991), along with other important novels such as Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs (1997) and AL McCann’s Subtopia (2005). Exploring Suburbia goes on to argue that Carey, Murnane and Steven Carroll defied the anti-suburban tradition and produced a body of suburban fiction that takes suburbia seriously and uses the spaces where the majority of Australians live to engage with crucial issues in Australian society, including immigration, environmental degradation, Indigenous rights, non-Indigenous belonging, capitalism and consumerism, domestic violence, religion and spirituality, class, race, gender and sexuality. Suburban literature, whether or not it contains anti-suburban rhetoric, provides crucial interrogations of Australian society and culture, and anti-suburban texts do not lack creativity, beauty, entertainment and perceptive depictions of Australian life. Many works of Australian suburban literature exist outside a simple anti-suburban or pro-suburban binary, and the texts that are most complex and ambivalent are often the most profound and rewarding, such as White’s Riders in the Chariot. The power of the anti-suburban tradition cannot be ignored, however, and its most significant effect is that Australian writers have set the majority of their works outside of suburbia, in the bush, the outback, country towns, the inner city, or overseas, despite the fact that most Australians have lived in the suburbs since the 1850s. When conducting research into Australian suburban literature, the lack of texts published before 1950 is striking. Searching the AustLit database using the terms ‘suburbia,’ ‘suburbs’ and ‘suburban’ produces varying results, ranging from 1,565 works for the search term ‘suburbia,’ 100,000+ works for ‘suburbs’ and 2,896 works categorised as ‘suburban.’ The list of results for each query contains a broad range of texts with regard to form, including poetry, novels, short stories, film and television, autobiography, criticism, drama, musical theatre, essays, children’s fiction, graphic novels and radio programmes. A range of genres are also represented, including adventure, romance, mystery, and crime. Additionally, the results for each keyword query are categorised according to subject; for example, the results for the query ‘suburban’ contain entries for texts classified as addressing more than 100 subjects, from ‘suburban life’ and ‘suburban landscape’ to ‘domestic life,’ ‘place and identity,’ and ‘boredom.’ Moreover, individual texts are indexed according to multiple subjects, and thus Winton’s brilliant short story ‘Aquifer,’ from The Turning (2004), is tagged with the following subject terms: ‘suburban landscape,’ ‘memories of childhood,’ ‘drowning,’ ‘neighbours,’ ‘guilt,’ ‘passage of time,’ and ‘secrets.’ The organisation of the AustLit database, along with the system of indexing and classification according to subject matter, inevitably results in much overlap in the search results for the terms ‘suburbia,’ ‘suburbs,’ and ‘suburban.’ When one carefully examines the results for multiple searches, looking for literary works set in the suburbs before 1950, one finds that the database lists less than 250 works of suburban literature created between 1788 and 1950, including poetry, short stories, novels, musical theatre and prose humour.5 The majority of the works listed are poems, short stories, satirical prose and musical theatre; most of the authors are no longer well known, with the exception of Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson, CJ Dennis, Ethel Turner and Jack Lindsay. The most significant texts with a suburban setting published before 1950 include Clarke’s ‘Nasturtium Villas’ (1874), Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911), Capel Boake’s Painted Clay (1917), Lesbia Harford’s The Invaluable Mystery (written circa 1921, but not published until 1987), Hilda Bridge’s Our Neighbours (1922), Lennie Lower’s Here’s Luck (1930), and Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) and For Love Alone (1944). Five of the seven novels were written by women, which is especially significant because the importance of women’s writing about suburban life has often

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not been adequately recognised by critics, especially when the texts focus on domestic life and marriage. The number of published works of suburban literature increases significantly after 1950, coinciding with post-Second World War immigration and suburban development booms. White’s novels, plays and short fiction are the most important works of suburban literature published during the 1950s and 1960s. White’s The Tree of Man (1955), Riders in the Chariot, The Burnt Ones (1964), The Season at Sarsaparilla (1965), The Solid Mandala, and ‘The Night the Prowler’ (1974) have considerably influenced suburban literature subsequently written by other authors. As previously mentioned, Johnston’s My Brother Jack established the anti-suburban tradition in Australian fiction, and the novel remains a popular canonical work. Other important suburban novels of the 1950s and 1960s include Elizabeth Harrower’s The Long Prospect (1958) and The Watch Tower (1966), which have received recent critical attention from Rooney. Fiction writers continued to produce the most comprehensive literary engagements with suburban life during the 1970s. Barbara Hanrahan published The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973) and Sea-Green (1974); Malouf ’s Johnno appeared in 1975, followed by Helen Hodgman’s Blue Skies (1976) and Murnane’s A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977), and Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River (1978). The novels by Hanrahan, Hodgman, Garner and Anderson are five of the most important suburban texts written by women, and their publication within a five-year period represents a remarkable flourishing of women’s writing about suburban life, which also produced Hewett’s acclaimed poetry collection Rapunzel in Suburbia (1975). Australian writers’ engagement with the suburbs continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s with the publication of many important novels and fiction collections, including Carey’s Bliss (1981) and The Tax Inspector (1991), Hanrahan’s Kewpie Doll (1984), Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape (1985), Liam Davison’s The Shipwreck Party (1989), Winton’s Cloudstreet (1991), Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995), Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs (1997), and Eliot Perlman’s Three Dollars (1998); as well as poetry by Vivian Smith, Katherine Gallagher, Jill Jones, Bruce Dawe, Gig Ryan, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Jan Owen; and short fiction by Malouf, Winton, Stead, Anderson, Peter Goldsworthy, Murray Bail, Elizabeth Jolley, Marion Halligan, and Janette Turner Hospital. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, new works of suburban literature were of ten highly innovative, such as Alan Wearne’s verse novel The Lovemakers (2001); Neil Boyack’s grunge short fiction collection, Transactions (2003); Wayne Macauley’s allegorical dystopian exurban novel, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe (2004); and McCann’s anti-suburban, antinationalist, transnational novel Subtopia. Damian McDonald set his debut novel Luck in the Greater West (2007) in Sydney’s western suburbs and ironically named his protagonist Patrick White. Shaun Tan’s remarkable collection of illustrated short stories, Tales from Outer Suburbia, appeared in 2008, along with Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap, which won eight awards, was shortlisted for four more, adapted for television in Australia and the United States, and translated into nine languages, making it one of the most successful works of suburban literature ever published in Australia. The first decade of the twenty-first century also saw the publication of Carroll’s The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), The Gift of Speed (2004), and The Time We Have Taken (2007), often referred to as the ‘Glenroy Trilogy’ due to their setting in the Melbourne suburb of Glenroy. Carroll has since published three more Glenroy novels, Spirit of Progress (2011), Forever Young (2015), and The Year of the Beast (2019). Carroll’s Glenroy novels are the most extensive engagement with suburban life by an Australian author; his work repeatedly demonstrates that suburban life is significant, complicated, beautiful and worth celebrating. Carroll’s achievements have been frequently recognised: he won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for The Time We Have Taken in 2008, was the joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2014 and has been shortlisted and longlisted for the Victorian

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Premier’s Literary Award, The Age Book of the Year Award, The Miles Franklin, the Prix Femina, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the ALS Gold Medal. Carroll is now the most important and successful living author of Australian suburban literature. The period from 2000 to 2010 can rightly be seen as a golden decade for Australian suburban literature, based on the works of Tan, Tsiolkas and Carroll alone, but the following decade may prove to be even more significant. Several poets staked their claims as preeminent voices of the suburbs with brilliant, ground-breaking books: David McCooey’s Outside (2011) and Star Struck (2016), Lachlan Brown’s Limited Cities (2012) and Lunar Inheritance (2017), Omar Musa’s verse novel Here Come the Dogs (2014), and Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses (2017) and The Lost Arabs (2019). More than a dozen significant works of suburban fiction have been published since 2010, including Tsiolkas’s Barracuda (2013), Carman’s An Elegant Young Man (2013), Castagna’s The Incredible Here and Now (2013) and No More Boats (2017), Ahmad’s The Tribe (2014) and The Lebs (2018), Laurie Steed’s You Belong Here (2018), Tom Lee’s Coach Fitz (2018), Polites’s Down the  Hume (2017) and The Pillars (2019), and Murnane’s A Season on Earth (2019). The majority of the aforementioned works of suburban fiction published since 2010 have settings in Sydney’s western suburbs; collectively, the texts make a convincing argument that the suburbs are the most important space in contemporary Australian society. The remainder of this chapter focuses on two works of Australian suburban literature published since 2010: Brown’s Limited Cities and Castagna’s No More Boats, both published by Giramondo, which has played a leading role in establishing the careers of writers from Sydney’s western suburbs. Rather than viewing suburbia as homogenous, boring, shallow, materialistic and devoid of interesting subject matter, Brown and Castagna explore the cultural and physical space in which the majority of Australians spend their lives and demonstrate its significance, beauty and complexity. Brown grew up in Macquarie Fields, a suburb in Sydney’s southwest. His open-minded, non-judgmental exploration of suburbia, combined with a Christian worldview, demonstrates a unique poetics that allows for the creation of original and compelling poetry and suggests new directions for Australian literature. The back-cover blurb for Limited Cities claims that Brown’s poetry ‘searches for and finds grace in outlying and disadvantaged parts of the city that are often derided and ignored,’ highlighting his combination of suburbia and Christianity. In a 2015 article for Southerly, Carman notes the rise of contemporary Australian authors of suburbia before arguing that some have been ‘lost in the mix … The first that comes to mind is Lachlan Brown.’ Carman argues that because Limited Cities is a poetry collection, it has the bad luck of being too culturally obscure to deserve an entry even within the narrative lineage of literary mutation for which it is progenitor. Brown’s effort also had the misfortune of being … ahead of the curve, too sensitive to the shadowy movements of a changing conceptual landscape. According to Carman, Brown plays many roles with astonishing versatility … Of all Brown’s poetic talents, it is his role as revelator that I find most thrilling. At times there seems in the poems of Limited Cities to be a tone of barely restrained eschatological ecstasy. Martin Duwell compares Brown to Dawe and Kenneth Slessor, two of Australia’s most renowned poets. Reviewers of Brown’s work have frequently noted his unique engagement with suburbia. Brown treats suburbia as perhaps the most significant space within Australian society, where important social issues, such as immigration, domestic violence and economic status, are located and debated.

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In the collection’s first poem, ‘Urban Sprawl. Macquarie Fields. Spring’s Edge 2004,’ the speaker declares, Give me corrugated iron & grinning billboards & a day as brilliant as a fire escape. It’s been raining for a week, but now the clear sky curves overhead like a fruiterer’s expansive arm. The ducks understand, paddling in a creek flushed with prams & plastic & spectating blackberries that sprawl on banks. (lines 1–6)

Here Brown presents a suburbia replete with iconic infrastructure, evidence of environmental degradation, the remnants of the pre-suburban natural environment, and the presence of beauty. Thus, the positive and negative elements of suburbia are presented together, highlighting the space’s complexity. Brown’s suburbia is home to residents who are frequently anxious about property prices, interest rates, mortgages and taxes, and thus the rhetoric of the housing market pervades the poems. In ‘Coming Home,’ Brown depicts a chessboard suburb, where every lung expands and contracts with its own economy; each breath another loan repayment, or a tax reduction blinking like a cursor. (lines 20–24)

In ‘Afternoon,’ the speaker claims that Two tyres against a wire fence would be holding hands if tyres had hands. That’s love, not satellite dish and colorbond love, but a heart mortgaged to the hilt. (lines 8–12)

The combination of ubiquitous material features of suburbia with human emotions highlights the complexity of the suburban environment. Tyres, fences and satellite dishes are not merely material possessions acquired through economic exchange; they are elements of human lives accorded significance by both the residents of suburbia and the poet. As the speaker of ‘Evensong’ asks, ‘Don’t you know that winter means / passing houses during the family meal, / each hallway bathed in a television’s blue?’ (lines 7–9). Within the suburban homes, people commune amid beauty provided by consumer goods. In this domestic moment, Brown reveals an aspect of suburban life that is often overlooked in favour of stories about crime, unemployment and domestic violence. Although Brown highlights the beauty and possibilities present within suburbia, he does not ignore suburbia’s dark side, including references to violence, crime and social problems. In the fourth part of ‘Poem for a Film,’ the speaker, positioned within an interior space, notes that ‘Outside drunk cries give // the blackness depth, shattering like bottles / hurled against a brick wall, and you recall // the sirens that ghost alongside your dreams’ (lines 6–9). The speaker implies that public drunkenness and violence are frequent events in suburbia, with the sirens so ubiquitous that they dwell within the subconscious. Likewise, in the fifth section of the poem, the speaker describes a day as being like ‘a Falcon, / chocked up in a front yard’ (lines 9–10) and ‘like a gate // that’s been welded shut because you know / we’re not in Vaucluse or near some beach // where they film iconic Australian TV’ (lines 10–13). Brown links the gate welded shut to deter theft with the suburb’s location within greater Sydney – the suburb is not Vaucluse (a wealthy harbourside suburb) or a coastal suburb where an iconic soap opera like Home and Away might be filmed. The

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emphasis here is on what the suburb lacks – prosperity, security and prestige. Within the final section of ‘Poem for a Film,’ Brown depicts outer suburbia as a site in which struggle is ubiquitous: within these cul-de-sacs you have to earn any hint or breath of change. You have to pay with sweat, with grease on a two-stroke, with teeth set like wire cutters, ready to meet the fenced-edge of the landscape. (lines 14–18)

Brown highlights the hard work required by the suburban battlers just to make ends meet and employs universal suburban imagery. Similarly, in ‘Twenty Sestets,’ the speaker states, ‘The lawnmowers are calling from suburb to suburb / and fences click in the heat’ (lines 5.1–2). Later in the poem, the speaker proclaims, O beautiful neighbour, he has edged his lawn for you! He has trained his jasmine to wander up trellises casting shadows onto the stencilled driveway of your heart. (lines 17.6–9)

Within Brown’s unique suburban poetics, iconic images of suburbia are employed to celebrate it and emphasise its beauty, as opposed to anti-suburban literature, which uses iconic images of suburbia as targets of mockery. In Brown’s poetics, suburbia is home – not merely a subject to write about, a place to observe or the source of interesting imagery and unusual events – but home in the most profound sense. In ‘Poem for a Film,’ the speaker depicts a ‘trail of brake lights’ on the motorway ‘guiding you home’ (lines 2.18). The daily commute, despite the hassle of rush-hour traffic, is a journey home, and the motorway is the pathway to home, rather than an escape route. In the collection’s brilliant final poem, ‘Outstretched Arms,’ the speaker maintains a hospital vigil with his brother who lies in a coma after an accident. While sitting beside his brother, the speaker remembers shared experiences: ‘perhaps we’re each remembering / backyard games of cricket in fading suburban light’ (lines 27–28). In this scene, the backyard cricket is far more than an iconic suburban childhood activity; it reveals brothers bonding amid beauty. The poem concludes with another vision of the speaker’s brother back home in suburbia: I can see my brother through the backyard’s fading light knocking nails out of fence palings whilst overhead the jacaranda is blessing the lawn with its flowers each falling gently like a final dying note. (lines 129–132)

Thus, the final image of the poem presents the speaker’s brother at home in the suburbs amid blessings showered by nature – a tremendously hopeful and beautiful image. Brown’s use of ‘blessing’ at the conclusion of ‘Outstretched Arms’ provides a graceful example of his ability to use Christianity within the suburban context to create a unique poetics. His rejection of the anti-suburban tradition, his open-minded and revelatory explorations of the suburbs and his frequent use of Christian imagery, rhetoric and ideas create an original, compelling corpus of poetry. Castagna’s novel No More Boats is set in Parramatta in the heart of Sydney’s western suburbs; like White, Carey and Tsiolkas, Castagna utilises a multicultural suburban setting to interrogate contemporary Australia’s treatment of refugees and migrants and pose difficult and complex questions about Australian identity, the possibility of establishing belonging, acts of exclusion, and the degree to which the Australian nation can put into practice the ideals of egalitarianism and the ‘fair go,’ especially when confronted by the competing forces of globalisation and nationalism. The action of No More Boats takes place in late August and early September of 2001, immediately 310

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before the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Castagna uses the Tampa refugee crisis of August 2001 and John Howard’s re-election campaign as the historical and cultural context for the novel and the catalyst for the actions of the protagonist, Antonio Martone, an Italian immigrant. While 438 refugees sit stranded on the Norwegian freighter Tampa, prevented from entering Australia by the Howard government, and Howard uses the Tampa crisis to campaign for re-election, encouraging xenophobia and racism among the electorate, Antonio’s life disintegrates. In the aftermath of a worksite accident that killed Antonio’s best mate Nico and left Antonio seriously injured and unable to work, Antonio suffers a mental breakdown. Antonio has lost the strong sense of identity he derived from his work and feels useless and helpless. Antonio left Italy at the age of 23 after the death of his parents in a mudslide and travelled by boat to Australia, where he became a self-made man. Antonio worked for 40 years in the building industry; not only did he build his own house room by room on a one-acre block, living the suburban immigrant dream, he spent four decades helping to build Sydney’s western suburbs, acquired investment properties and earned the respect of his co-workers and neighbours. After the accident and the loss of Nico, forced into retirement, Antonio feels he has no purpose in life, nothing to contribute to society, and no future. His marriage is strained and he lacks close relationships with his adult children. As Antonio states when speaking to Nico’s ghost, You know, I was everything they told me to be, I did the jobs they told me to do, never complained, worked hard, stopped speaking my own language, looked the other way when they called me names. Now, everything is different, what a waste. They laugh at me when I speak. (27) In addition to Antonio’s personal struggles, the environment around him is evolving. Immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East have moved into Parramatta, and the house next door has been demolished to make way for an apartment block that will bring many new residents to the street and diminish the degree of privacy Antonio can enjoy. Antonio feels that the world is closing in on him and changing in ways he cannot comprehend or control; his response is to look for a scapegoat. At the urging of xenophobic politicians, Antonio comes to see the most recent immigrants to Australia and the asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia as responsible for the negative aspects of his life. Antonio even blames other immigrants on the jobsite for the accident that killed Nico. Rather than feel a kinship with his fellow migrants, Antonio perceives himself to be a ‘real Australian,’ having established a right to belong and shed his immigrant identity through four decades of residency, voluntary assimilation, and the repression of his native culture and language. In the aftermath of his forced retirement, Antonio avoids his family and friends. He spends his nights driving around housing estates he helped build, washing down painkillers with whisky, listens to Phillip Ruddock give a speech at the RSL stoking fear of refugees and migrants, reads ‘every page’ of the newspapers ‘with a religious fervour’ (101), and spends hours in front of the television imbibing Howard’s rhetoric of fear: On the TV, the dull man. The average, ordinary type of Australian man who does not talk too loud or too soft. He said in his perfectly paced sentences: ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’. (77) In Ghassan Hage’s White Nation (2000) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003), he argues that Australian society is plagued by fears. In White Nation, Hage contends that many contemporary Australians are beset by worry, and that worrying is for many people ‘the last available strategy for staying in control of social processes over which they no longer have much control’ (10). Hage expands his thesis in Against Paranoid Nationalism, describing contemporary Australian society as a ‘paranoid nationalist culture’; he claims that Australian society is ‘defensive,’ ‘suffers from a 311

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scarcity of hope,’ and creates paranoid citizens ‘who see threats everywhere’ (xii, 3). Hage is particularly critical of the Howard government, claiming that Howard’s administration took a previously existing ‘subculture of colonial White paranoia’ and moved it to the centre of Australian culture. Antonio clearly suffers from the worry, fear, paranoia, and xenophobic nationalism Hage describes. The combination of Antonio’s paranoid nationalism and his mental and physical demise leads to the central act of the novel: Antonio paints the words NO MORE BOATS in massive letters on his concrete front yard, covering every inch of the concrete with the declaration (122). Antonio’s act inspires a prompt response: local kids throw stones and eggs at the house; passers-by yell abuse and support; a neighbour camps out nearby on a white plastic chair with a Pauline Hanson poster; protesters and supporters take photos of themselves in front of the house; crowds gather, and the police prevent skinhead nationalists and Islander immigrants from beating each other up (122–126). Antonio is subsequently co-opted by an anti-immigrant white nationalist group and attends their meetings, which include debates about the demise of the White Australia policy and nostalgic discussions about William Lane and the ‘yellow peril’ (143–144). Antonio’s psychological demise and descent into a racist, paranoid xenophobic worldview accelerates during the final quarter of the novel. He loses the ability to discern reality from fantasy, and the novel concludes with Antonio pointing a plastic gun at the head of a ‘foreign-looking’ ferry captain on the Parramatta River, an event that consumes the media’s attention for the 12 hours immediately preceding the attacks on the twin towers in New York (217–219). Given the fact that more than 50% of Australians were either born overseas, are married to an immigrant or have at least one immigrant parent, and hundreds of thousands of people attempt to come to Australia each year as legal immigrants or asylum seekers, questions surrounding belonging, exclusion, inclusion, nationalism and egalitarianism remain central to Australian society and identity, and such questions deserve ongoing debate and exploration, both within the public sphere and the literary community. Castagna’s No More Boats is a necessary intervention into such debates; it does not attempt to have the final say or even provide answers, yet it performs the crucial work of moving the debate forward and pushing Australian readers to ask, ‘Who are we? Who gets to come here? Who gets to belong? Who deserves a fair go? And who has the right to decide?’ The suburbs are the perfect site in which to set a novel interrogating Australian culture and identity, since the majority of Australians live in the suburbs, Australia is an overwhelmingly suburban nation, and it is within the suburbs that the most important issues in Australian society are confronted, debated, experienced and perhaps even resolved. In 2018, Lachlan Brown and I coedited a special issue of Cordite Poetry Review devoted to suburbia. We received an overwhelming response to our call for submissions: almost 2,000 poems from more than 600 poets, and we only had enough space to publish 60 poems. The experience demonstrated the tremendous interest in the suburbs as the subject for poetry and the massive number of poets writing about suburban life. As we wrote in our editorial for the issue, [The] collection of poems represents a diverse and compelling cross-section of Australian and international suburban writing … The massive response to our request for poems on the theme of suburbia testifies to the importance and ubiquity of suburbia in contemporary writing. The poetic responses to suburbia ranged from celebratory to disparaging, revealing both the pervasive influence of the anti-suburban tradition in Anglophone (especially Australian) literature and the desire and ability of many contemporary writers to abandon, dismantle, sidestep, reconfigure or ignore reductive stereotypes of suburbia. The work of the 60 poets published in the special issue of Cordite, in addition to the works by Brown and Castagna, as well as their contemporaries, demonstrates that Australian suburban literature is fully established, highly significant and enjoying a creative zenith more than 170 years since the first works of Australian suburban literature were produced. 312

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Notes 1 In Patrick White’s essay ‘The Prodigal Son’ (1958), he writes about the composition of his novel The Tree of Man (1955), declaring that he sought ‘to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which alone could make bearable the lives of … [average] people’ (39). While the last part of the quotation contains fodder for debates about White’s elitism, I have borrowed the phrase ‘the extraordinary behind the ordinary’ for the title of this chapter, since it conveys a key concept regarding suburban literature that I wish to emphasise, namely that suburban life can be extraordinary, contrary to anti-suburban stereotypes. 2 For detailed discussions of the history of Australia’s suburbs and background information on the significance of suburbia in Australian culture, see Davison; Horne; O’Reilly; Rooney. 3 Permission to quote from Lachlan Brown’s poetry in this chapter provided by the author. 4 For more on the anti-suburban intellectual tradition in Australian literature and culture, see Gilbert; Rowse; McCann; O’Reilly; Rooney. 5 All AustLit database searches conducted on 28 May 2019.

Works Cited Brown, Lachlan. Limited Cities. Sydney, NSW: Giramondo, 2012. Brown, Lachlan, and Nathanael O’Reilly. ‘SUBURBIA Editorial.’ Cordite Poetry Review 84 (2018). . Carman, Luke. ‘Revelators, Visionaries, Poets and Fools: The Palimpsest of Sydney’s Western Suburbia.’ Southerly 7 May 2015. . Castagna, Felicity. No More Boats. Sydney, NSW: Giramondo, 2017. Davison, Graeme. ‘Australia – The First Suburban Nation.’ Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40–74. Duwell, Martin. ‘Rev. Limited Cities, by Lachlan Brown.’ Australian Poetry Review 1 Jan. 2013. . Esson, Louis. ‘Our Institutions.’ The Time is Not Yet Ripe. 1912. Ed. Philip Parsons. Melbourne, VIC: Currency, 1973. Gilbert, Alan. ‘The Roots of Anti-Suburbanism in Australia.’ Australian Cultural History. Ed. SL Goldberg and FB Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 33–49. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. London: Pluto, 2000. ———. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. London: Pluto, 2003. Horne, Donald. The Lucky Country. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964. McCann, Andrew. ‘Introduction: Subtopia, or the Problem of Suburbia.’ Australian Literary Studies 18.4 (1998): vii–x. O’Reilly, Nathanael. Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel. Amherst, NY: Teneo, 2012. Rooney, Brigid. Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity. London: Anthem, 2018. Rowse, Tim. ‘Heaven and a Hill’s Hoist: Australian Critics on Suburbia.’ Meanjin 37.1 (1978): 3–13. White, Patrick. ‘The Prodigal Son.’ Australian Letters 1.3 (1958): 37–40.

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32 Australian Literature and Everyday Life Andrew McCann

The phrase ‘everyday life’ signifies in two radically different registers. On the one hand, nothing could be more apparently straightforward in its gesture towards an immediacy that eludes theorisation. On the other hand, few phrases carry as much theoretical mediation as this one. It is impossible to use the phrase in a local sense without also summoning a diverse range of theoretical constellations (from Martin Heidegger’s Alltäglichkeit to Henri Lefebvre’s la vie quotidienne) that constitute their own field of value.1 If that were not onerous enough, to discuss literature in conjunction with everyday life, to couple the two concepts with a simple conjunction, as if that alone were capable of putting them into an easy and intelligible dialogue, belies the fundamental undecidability in the relationship between them. As Maurice Blanchot writes, the everyday is ‘platitude’: it is ‘what lags and falls behind, the residual life with which we fill our trash cans and cemeteries: scraps and refuse’ (239). At least from the perspective of people who work in English departments, and probably much more broadly than that, literature retains a value that holds it clear of this sort of formlessness. The confidence with which we can maintain this sense of literature’s autonomy from the everyday, however, will depend on many things, disciplinary perspective and class identity (which will turn out loosely to parallel each other) foremost among them. Let me say at the outset that this discussion will have very little to say about representations of everyday life in literature (though saying something about them will be unavoidable). To merely track representations in this way betrays a sort of methodological naivety that blithely grants literature or literariness dominion over the realm of non-textual objects and practices: it already assumes, in other words, a hierarchical relationship between literature and the everyday that, outside of a particular disciplinary perspective, is very far from self-evident. Nor will I have time to delve terribly far into the many expansive theorisations of the everyday that are more or less assumed whenever the phrase appears in an academic context. Instead I am interested in thinking about the relationship between the two terms, literature and the everyday, and the disciplinary debates that frame that relationship. These debates have been especially vivid in Australia, where an interdisciplinary model of cultural studies has existed in sometimes combative dialogue with literary studies since at least the 1990s, and in turn profoundly influenced the way Australian writing is thought about and produced. What is partly at stake here is the exceptionalism of what could be called the aesthetic disciplines in regard to the multitude of other everyday activities that constitute culture (and as we will see, culture, in the sense intended by cultural studies, is a rough synonym for the everyday, or at least a very closely related term). But the tension in the relationship between literature and the everyday is also more deeply ingrained than that. In the field of Australian literary production, where the dominance of realism has tended to mark (or 314

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marginalise) more self-consciously writerly textual forms, the opposition between aesthetic autonomy and the everyday experience of the political has profoundly shaped the ways in which both critics and authors have imagined their callings. In this chapter I want to unfold and contextualise some of these tensions. It will be a piecemeal undertaking, because what is at stake is the marking of fault lines within and between different forms of creative and critical practice, not an explication of the relationship between two discrete and self-evidently defined entities. I begin with two theoretical models that sketch what seems to be the disciplinary tension informing the relationship between literature and everyday life: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s evocation of aesthetic autonomy in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and Lefebvre’s critique of the literary constitution of the marvellous in the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life (1947). These contemporaneous texts could both be described as works of historical materialism, and yet the immediate differences between them represent quite divergent approaches to the aesthetic vis-à-vis the everyday. In the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno set out an account of aesthetic exceptionalism that establishes the power of the artwork and its nonidentity with the everyday. Discussing the broader process by which the enlightenment establishes the mythic power of its own norms, they essentially offer a genealogy of the modern artwork that insists on its cultic origins. Art, they write, has in common with magic the postulation of a special, self-contained sphere removed from the context of profane existence. Within it special laws prevail. Just as the sorcerer begins the ceremony by marking out from all its surroundings the place in which the sacred forces are to come into play, each work of art is closed off from reality by its own circumference. (13–14) In this self-contained sphere, art differentiates itself from other aspects of social and cultural production in a way that is both analogous to and an outgrowth of the sacral practices of broadly premodern societies. Art sublates the ‘heritage of magic’ precisely because, in the bourgeois epoch, it renounces the ‘external effects’ associated with magic. It thus becomes purposeless, which guarantees its autonomy from instrumental logics. This ‘renunciation places the pure image in opposition to corporeal existence.’ It is thus in the nature of the work of art, of aesthetic illusion, to be what was experienced as a new and terrible event in the magic of primitives: the appearance of the whole in the particular. The work of art constantly reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared as something spiritual, a manifestation of mana. That constitutes its aura. As an expression of totality art claims the dignity of the absolute. This has occasionally led philosophy to rank it higher than conceptual knowledge. (14) It would be hard to find a clearer statement of the autonomy of art from the everyday, which in this paradigm appears in the guises of ‘profane existence’ (as opposed to the sacred), ‘corporeal life’ (as opposed to the ‘pure image’), and finally a ‘reality’ emptied of the totality that art can claim to express. In all of these guises it is the autonomy of art with its secular iteration of the sacred that defines, by way of marginalisation or trivialisation, what can only appear as the degraded realm of instrumental practice. The everyday, in this configuration, has no obvious normative or emancipatory potential because of the insistence with which the perspective associated with the artwork recodes it as the inferior term in a hierarchical relationship. To the extent that historical materialism retains its faith in the aesthetic (in the work of thinkers influenced by the Frankfurt School especially), it will tend to reproduce a version of this framework. The opening of volume one of Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, by contrast, takes issue with the aesthetic, or at least a particular version of it, as a privileged way of knowing. At many 315

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moments it reads like a direct rebuttal of the relationship between magic and aesthetics set out by Adorno and Horkheimer, although Lefebvre’s subsequent comments about Adorno in volume three of Critique of Everyday Life will also bring the two much closer together than one might at first imagine. ‘Under the banner of the marvellous,’ Lefebvre writes, ‘nineteenth-century literature mounted a sustained attack on everyday life which has continued unabated up to the present day. The aim is to demote it, to discredit it’ (125). The stakes for Lefebvre are, of course, very high. For him the possibility of Marxism as an actual political project depends on loosening the ideological orientation to a version of the aesthetic (one that begins with Charles Baudelaire, runs through Arthur Rimbaud and Gustave Flaubert, and culminates with Surrealism) that, in the opposition between the everyday and the marvellous, also reproduced the opposition between ‘action and dream, the real and the ideal.’ The dismissal of ‘real life, the world “as it is”’ was the ideological blind spot of ‘nineteenth-century man’ (125). In a way that seems to reverse the trajectory from magic to aesthetics that underpins Horkheimer and Adorno’s thinking, Lefebvre also insists that the apparently revolutionary claims of Surrealism exhaust themselves in a form of mystification that depends on rediscovering the delusional magic apparently dwelling within the ordinary. In this way it reveals itself as pseudo-revolutionary: the repudiation of everyday life and of ‘human reality’ amount to the same thing. Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Lefebvre also has a sense of cultural history or anthropology that moves away from a moment at which ‘the mysterious, the sacred and the diabolical, magic, ritual, the mystical’ (137) held sway over lived reality and constituted real forces in the lives of human beings. But he sees the sublation of the magical into the aesthetic as a process of degeneration that crucially hinges on their increasing alienation from everyday life: Everything that once represented an affective, immediate and primitive relationship between man and the world – everything that was serious, deep, cosmic – is displaced and sooner or later gradually enters the domain of play, or art, or just simply becomes amusing or ironic verbalisation. (137) This process generates the subject of what we might call a modern literary sensibility, ‘the sensitive, lucid, cultivated young man with a gift for “belles lettres”’ who has ‘a feeling of unease and dissatisfaction which can only be assuaged by something strange, bizarre or extraordinary’ (141). Reconstrued as a theoretical position based on the prioritisation of aesthetic experience over everyday life, this sensibility is, for Lefebvre, reactionary and has only ‘formal similarities’ to the kind of left critique with which it is often associated. What he wants to accomplish instead is a redescription of everyday life as the space of the dialectic: as a domain of both alienation and emancipatory potential. In order to achieve this he will need to distinguish the human from the bourgeois in the interests of a politics based on the lived experiences and needs of ordinary people. The framework I have just sketched is broad enough to accommodate virtually any phase of Australian literary history from about the mid-nineteenth century on. When, in 1877, Henry Kendall lamented that lack of literary culture in the colonies, he was also assuming a hierarchy in which the aesthetic stands above the fray of everyday activity, which he characterises as overwhelmingly commercial: ‘Hustle and bustle must exist in a country where there is so much to gain by commercial and manual industry; and hence, our people are too mobile for the purposes of Art.’ As a result, he concluded that Australia has little demand for ‘literature of a high and exacting character’ (184–185). This sort of comment, which lingers through colonial literary history, ensures that literature appears sequestered from the everyday, as if its condition of possibility were a certain sort of insularity in regard to the ordinary business of living. The Romanticism that Kendall shared with Charles Harpur will enact this separation in the insistence with which poetry formally differentiates itself from other forms of social and cultural production. In the work of 316

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Christopher Brennan at the turn of the century, it is clear that the space of the poetic, with its symbolist inclinations and its orientation to a dense mythological framework, has largely closed itself off from the more populist or nationalist forms of writing that dominate our conception of the 1890s and that are, today, very hard to integrate into a conception of the literary that assumes the autonomy of the aesthetic. In fact, one of the challenges scholars working on Australian literature face is that writing that eschews this set of hierarchies in favour of politics or populism ends up being too thematically oriented, too much a matter of content rather than form, to generate the ‘sophisticated’ forms of close reading and exegesis that are often taken as markers of academic capital. Serious literature, so the argument might go, demands endless rereading, which is dependent on a formal complexity that has differentiated itself from everyday ways of knowing. While late-nineteenth-century debates around realism, aestheticism, romance, melodrama and the occult can all be framed in terms of the relationship between literature and the everyday, it is probably the decades immediately after the Second World War that lend the opposition its contemporary topicality. It is here that the everyday settles over the literary landscape in a way that seems both more oppressive and more generative than ever before. Australia’s belated reception of modernism has something to do with this: we only need to glance at work by T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence to see the ways in which everyday experience is reframed as indicative of a fractured and fallen modernity in need of some sort of redemptive intervention. Just as important are the transformations in post-war life through which the everyday becomes overwritten by new forms of consumerism. One of Lefebvre’s most influential positions is to understand this transformation in terms of its relationship to processes of colonisation. In volume two of Critique of Everyday Life he draws on Guy Debord to suggest that ‘everyday life has literally been “colonised”’: ‘it has been brought to an extreme point of alienation … in the name of the latest technology and of “consumer society”’ (305). The notion of colonisation here is not intended as a figurative evocation of colonial processes. On the contrary, the colonisation of the everyday can be conceptualised as an actual outgrowth of those processes that coincides with a transformation in the relationship between the metropole and the colony. Hence, as conquered territories assert autonomy and gain independence, ‘daily life replaces the colonies.’ Incapable of maintaining the old imperialism, searching for new tools of domination, and having decided to bank on the home market, capitalist leaders treat daily life as they once treated the colonised territories: massive trading posts (supermarkets and shopping centres); absolute predominance of exchange over use; dual exploitation of the dominated in their capacity as producers and consumers. (702) This position has been developed by Kristen Ross, who locates a heightened awareness of the everyday in processes that reorient the administrative practices of a waning empire to forms of ‘interior colonisation.’ As she puts it, ‘rational administrative techniques developed in the colonies were brought home and put to use side by side with new technological innovations such as advertising in reordering metropolitan, domestic society, the “everyday life” of its citizens’ (7). This argument, which sees modernisation as an extension and a displacement of colonial practices, has been influential in redescribing the prevailing anti-suburban ethos of major Australian writers in the second half of the twentieth century. From this perspective, descriptions of suburbia in works by Patrick White, George Johnston and others manifest a process in which homogenisation becomes the medium that lets everyday life appear as an object not of critique in Lefebvre’s sense, but of anxiety, paranoia and loathing that attach to new forms of consumerism and domestic management. The forms of spatial control, the discourses of hygiene, the anxieties around filth and abjection, and the increasingly rationalised character of experience that Ross maps in French and Algerian contexts, all have uncomfortable resonances in Australian writing. The observations that 317

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Patrick White’s suburb is a direct outgrowth of colonialism (in The Tree of Man [1955] or Riders in the Chariot [1961], for instance) and that it is also directly linked to a demotic racism that targets indigenous Australians and immigrants (in Riders in the Chariot, most obviously) ask us to see the everyday experience of domestic life as implicated in broader forms of control. Hence Mrs Jolley’s fanatical investment in the ‘red brick boxes increasing and encroaching’ in Riders in the Chariot (67), her abhorrence of filth, her affection for pink icing and her fantasies of corporate conjugality are all clearly implicated in a more sinister and ultimately violent set of racial practices.2 The general ethos set out here is a commonplace of prominent Australian writing in the postwar years. No novel I can think of evokes this dismal colonisation of the everyday as emphatically as George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), where a sort of feckless but romantic vision of an Australian suburban vernacular is displaced by Beverly Grove, a garden subdivision, that embodies the horror of middle-class homogenisation: ‘the deadening democracy of a system which could dictate, over nearly one square-mile of human habitation, that no man should have one more light-switch or power-point or water-faucet or sliding door than any other!’ ( Johnston 239). Although it is seldom discussed in this context, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) is very much of a piece with this sort of fiction. If writers like White and Johnston concentrate the homogenising effects of the everyday in and around female characters who become tyrannical arbiters of domestic hygiene, Greer’s vision of the nuclear family in its suburban form sees women as the primary victims of this thoroughgoing reorganisation of everyday life. While The Female Eunuch pursues this through a predominantly British context, its vision of suburbanisation cannot conceal its overwhelming affinities with the Australian fiction of the decade preceding it. Greer’s vision of the interface between patriarchy and capitalism is full of images of alienation that crystallise in the suburbanisation of the nuclear family. It is here that the colonisation of everyday life takes on its most visible and material form. A dead man makes a good employee and his dead wife sits obliterated in her red-brick mausoleum waiting for her husband to come home so that they can continue their game of ritual murder – whether by caresses or taunts and blows makes little difference, for each man kills the thing he loves, as Oscar Wilde remarked with characteristic irresponsibility. The techniques which are employed to keep young children at the level of dolls and cripples are employed in the marital love situation to seal off the egotistical unit. Baby-talk, even to the extent of calling the husband ‘daddy’ or ‘poppa,’ and the wife ‘momma’ or ‘mother’ and both partners alike ‘baby,’ keeps the discourse to a correctly fatuous level. (Greer 177) We can hear echoes of White and Johnston but also of Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (1940), a novel that very clearly presents domestic and neocolonial paternalism as continuous and co-dependent practices. And as with all these writers, Greer’s sense of the suburbanisation of the nuclear family produces the everyday as a space of sinister infantilisation, psychic violence and sexual repression. It should not be especially surprising that across all of this material the aesthetic offers an alternative to the everyday: a space to escape into, a resource for interiority or a form of cultural capital that will enable characters to distinguish themselves from their material environments. David Meredith in Johnston’s novel will develop a literary career initially around his vision of maritime travel. Louie in Stead’s novel declares polemically that she ‘can’t bear the horror of everyday life’ (410) and writes a tragedy (in an invented language) that clarifies the pathological nature of her domestic experience. White’s Sarsaparilla harbours artists and visionaries who hold out the possibility of either transcending or retreating from the everyday. And in Greer’s The Female Eunuch, introjected passages of poetry and philosophy, from writers such as William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and others, have the effect of 318

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puncturing or clarifying the everyday from a discursive space that one is invited to imagine as outside of or antithetical to it. At the same time, it is not difficult to argue that all these texts produce exaggerated, perhaps caricatured visions of the everyday in which countervailing viewpoints take on a kind of distinction that is only possible if we assume the prior hierarchisation of everyday life and aesthetic experience. What we have here is a version of Horkheimer and Adorno’s sense of the exceptionality of the aesthetic in which literature becomes the most logical and readily available antidote to the everyday. Nothing captures the predictability of this posture better than the despairing literary sensibility of David Malouf ’s eponymous character in Johnno (1975): Brisbane was nothing: a city that blew neither hot nor cold, a place where nothing happened, and where nothing ever would happen, because it had no soul. People suffered here without significance. It was too mediocre even to be a province of hell. It would have defeated even Baudelaire. A place where poetry could never occur. (84) But Malouf ’s novel is also affectionately committed to Brisbane in a way that makes the passage I have just quoted hard to locate as an expression of authorial intention. And its concluding notes are brilliant in their conjuring of the colonisation of the everyday in a modernising Australia. As with so much writing in this vein, the suggestion of irony in the dismissal of the everyday remains strategically ambiguous. The antipathy is compelling in its conviction. It is easy to imagine a reader steeped in Baudelaire (or in the arc between romanticism and modernism more generally) nodding along. But because the antipathy is displaced onto a markedly immature character it is simultaneously bracketed as subjective or provisional. Read from the perspective of Lefebvre, however, these texts essentially alienate the everyday from its own emancipatory potential. It is hardly surprising then that the emergence of cultural studies as a powerful movement in the Australian academy, and in Australian intellectual life more broadly, would force writers and critics to rethink the relationship between aesthetic experience and the everyday. In the late-1980s and the 1990s, the influence of Lefebvre, Roland Barthes (Mythologies [1957]), Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life [1980]), and Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste [1979]), as well as a British model of cultural studies primarily associated with the Birmingham School, invited Australian critics to decentre conceptions of aesthetic experience and to focus instead on a broader conception of culture, ranging from everyday practices like cooking, shopping, playing sport or watching television, to everyday spaces like suburban homes, pubs, beaches and malls. In Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (1995), an especially lucid encapsulation of this shift, John Frow defines the subdiscipline in explicit opposition to a kind of aesthetic experience that now seems anachronistic: Cultural studies’ starting point is an inclusive conception of culture which it derives indirectly from anthropology and which it understands to cover the whole range of practices and representations through which a social group’s reality (or realities) is constructed and maintained. It is a conception that radically disables the forms of universalism held by traditional aesthetics. (3) The term ‘inclusive’ here gestures at the democratic underpinnings of the formation, while the term ‘traditional’ effects its own form of temporalising in which a particular form of aesthetic experience is denied the coevalness that, after Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983), is an axiom of woke anthropology. But Frow’s sense of a distinction between works ‘founded in freedom and internal necessity on the one hand, and in unfreedom and external (economic) necessity on the other’ (18) precisely captures the mystified lure of the aesthetic that cultural studies seeks to displace. 319

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The way this paradigm dovetails with imperatives and pressures that seem deeply ingrained in Australian intellectual and cultural experience is clear when we turn to something like John Fiske, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner’s jointly authored Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (1987). Here the inclusivity that Frow foregrounds is directly linked to a demotic sense of Australian identity that is apparently obscured or denigrated by the aesthetic disciplines: From all sides we had been hearing the long-established, traditional criticism bewailing the lack of an Australian culture. Yet this wasn’t at all how it felt for us as typical-enough denizens of Australia, living in this self-styled cultural desert, this culture which we’re told does not exist. It wasn’t that we saw nothing to criticise in Australian life and culture. But the Australia we lived in had a richness and diversity that was incompatible with the Australia of the cultural critics. (Fiske, Hodge, and Turner viii) It is difficult not hear voices like White’s, Johnston’s or Malouf ’s lingering in the background: recall White’s scathing comments about the ‘exaltation of the average’ and the ‘Great Australian Emptiness’ with which he introduces his own project as a search for ‘the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry’ which he imagines will make the lives of ordinary people ‘bearable’ (Patrick White Speaks 15). It is also difficult not to hear the assertion of a democratic interest in the Australian everyday, which comes into focus as soon as we acknowledge what Myths of Oz calls a ‘more populist and more comprehensive’ (viii) conception of culture. Though it is all very understated, this strain of Australian cultural studies could be construed as postcolonial in its rejection of imported, Eurocentric cultural hierarchies. And though it is critical of both nationalism and, implicitly, the presumed pre-eminence of ‘traditional’ conceptions of culture bound up with the literary, its embrace of the ordinary and the everyday shares with literary nationalism its gravitation to the culture of the people. In this respect it also allows us to see the way in which the opposition between literature and the everyday can be made to imply class-based positions and ideologies that, earlier in the century, might have been evident in the opposition between aestheticism and realism. Even its clear orientation to Barthes’s Mythologies seems underplayed in an effort to avoid a theoretical jargon that, one assumes, too easily segues back into the literary formations Myths of Oz is trying to displace. While the rejection of ‘traditional’ conceptions of the literary can seem reflexive and formulaic in some of this work, at other moments cultural studies has shown how the circulation of the literary has in fact been central to the constitution of everyday experience. Ian Hunter’s work on governmentality (a term that also approximates the idea of the colonisation of everyday life), while not specifically focused on Australia, is a particularly compelling version of this position. Hunter argues that the aesthetic ethos helps us withdraw from the ‘world as a sphere of mundane knowledge and action’ at the same time that it underpins an educational apparatus directly bound up with the governmental structures that form the basis of this world. It is thus a powerful mode of control that makes itself unavailable as an object of critique. ‘It is precisely this new “governmentalised” form of society,’ Hunter writes, ‘that the aesthetic ethos constitutes as the “mechanical,” “alienated,” “ordinary,” and “mundane” world to be transcended’ (Hunter 362). At the same time, however, the aesthetic ethos obscures its own constitutive role in the perpetuation of these governmental forms. It is tempting to imagine cultural studies as somehow occurring in a discursive space that is parallel to that of literary production. But in Australia, where literary production has been moving closer and closer to the academy at least since the 1990s, that view would be misleading. With so many contemporary writers nested in academic life, and so many more emerging through creative writing programmes, the general intellectual climate of the university has also been a significant factor in the waxing and waning of a sense of literature’s autonomy from the everyday. No one 320

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has grasped this as acutely as Marion May Campbell, whose novel konkretion (2013) explores the alienation of an ageing, university-based novelist (Monique Piquet) in the midst of the turn away from the aesthetic ethos: For some of Monique’s colleagues, poetry, and while we’re at it all of so-called literary fiction, is a right-wing plot, effete, aristocratic nostalgia, a stepping out in diamonds and furs. Their scorn for the cultivation of failure, the work of endless patience and attentiveness, still makes her seethe with rage. (12) Anyone who has worked in an Australian university and experienced the collision of literary studies, cultural studies and creative writing will know exactly what she is getting at. Campbell’s novel, with its at times ecstatic flight towards the avant garde, is one response to the ways in which an awareness of the constitution of the everyday has re-evaluated the aesthetic in particular (often problematic) ways. It also represents a particular kind of engagement with this issue and a willingness to take its cultural situation seriously. Elsewhere, however, Australian writers’ ability to move away from an apparently traditionally constituted sense of aesthetic autonomy has suggested other ways to write and theorise the relationship between the literary and the everyday. I still find Christos Tsiolkas’s early work (Loaded [1995] and The Jesus Man [1999]) especially compelling because it allows the alienation of everyday experience to corrode the ordering potential of literary form in ways that show an exemplary fidelity to its conditions of production. Loaded evokes the possibility of the Bildungsroman only to drift through the formlessness of post-industrial experience in which conventional modes of novelistic closure have been rendered virtually impossible. In this sense it understands that grasping the everyday as a sight of alienation is also the first step towards demystifying the everyday and making it available as a sphere of action. Though The Jesus Man is a much bleaker novel, its relentless depiction of how consumer society penetrates subjectivity and redefines it from the inside out reminds us of what literature can do once it steps away from an aesthetic ethos bound up with transcendence or flight (or good taste).3 Both of these novels are about the corrosively ideological effects of boredom. At least one of them fell foul of a conservative critical apparatus that was still oriented to ‘traditional’ conceptions of the literary. There are a couple of other obvious ways in which literature and the everyday might be imagined as correlated in the contemporary Australian landscape. First, re-enchantment or an orientation to the sacred has been an important feature of modern Australian writing. White’s novels embody this, but we also find it in a wide range of other canonical Australian writers (Malouf and Judith Wright, for example), where it is ambiguously linked to a melancholic engagement with indigeneity that dovetails with an explicitly postcolonial sensibility. This has also been a staple of recent Australian literary criticism (David Tacey, Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden come to mind) in which the sacred becomes a way of revivifying an Australian spatial imaginary.4 It would be wrong to describe this work as a repudiation of the everyday. In fact, it often insists on locating the sacred in it. But it does imply a restorative recourse to the autonomy of aesthetic experience as a medium for the sacred and in this way it repeats Horkheimer and Adorno’s sense of the artwork as somehow separate from the profane, the ordinary, and the mundane. If we follow Tacey’s sense of this, we leave the everyday and enter the realm of mythopoesis, which is not terribly far away from the conventional idea that literary form constitutes its own bulwark against the everyday. Second, and with the cultural studies-inspired shift towards popular and middlebrow fiction in mind, we can think about the ways in which Australian writers have departed from forms that imply the autonomy of aesthetic experience in order to engage more directly with commercial logics, a broader media environment and, by extension, an immediately topical set of political debates. Andrew McGahan’s Underground, Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist, and Linda 321

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Jaivin’s The Infernal Optimist (all 2006), all responding to an increasingly xenophobic post-9/11 environment, work like this. More recently Tsiolkas’s work (The Slap [2008] and Barracuda [2013]) has highlighted the crossover between literature and a broader media environment in a way that seems calibrated to maximise political impact via integration into everyday forms of circulation (lifestyle journalism, literary festivals, and television adaptations, for instance). A recent upsurge of interest in middlebrow cultural formations has stressed this sense of the literary as continuous with other forms of cultural production and circulation and has, in turn, produced more demystified and realistic appraisals of the social effects of literary texts and subcultures than what has hitherto been the norm in those forms of literary studies based on close reading and theory-driven exegesis. Brigid Rooney’s Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (2009) is especially interesting here. In it she demonstrates how a residual conception of aesthetic autonomy, what she calls ‘literary-field-related values of freedom and autonomy’ (183), can be repurposed as a claim to authority in a public sphere oriented to non-specialist audiences. Tsiolkas, Tim Winton, Richard Flannery, and Anna Funder are all writers whose careers have evolved in this way. Rooney’s scholarship melds literary studies with the pragmatism of cultural studies to produce a framework that attempts to articulate the specific social contexts in which writing and reading produce meaning and value. But with all of this material we are still caught in the aporia implied by the title of this chapter: media forms (like literature) that orient to leisure, entertainment and distraction tend to structure their engagement with and integration into the everyday as a simultaneous differentiation from the everyday. This is the logic of aesthetic autonomy, but it is also the logic of the culture industry, which as both Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno insist merely reproduces the aura of the aesthetic in an attenuated or decaying form.5 At the end of the day, the kind of public that forms around the consumption of Winton’s novels might not be substantially different in structure to the publics that John Hartley discusses in regard to the mainstream celebrity of figures like Kylie Minogue and Sophie Lee. In both cases the apparent extraction of a politics from leisure activities seems to reinscribe precisely the problem that materialist theories of both literature and the everyday set out to address: the difficulty of distinguishing emancipatory potential from alienation. Even the most robust and optimistic defences of popular or middlebrow reading cannot entirely dispel the suspicion that an admittedly quixotic sense of resistance to the everyday has merely been replaced with a fairly uncritical submission to it. The alternatives to the aporia take us well beyond the scope of this chapter and towards various vanishing points at which literature itself ceases to be a meaningful or even an operative category. At one extreme, we could think about the pragmatism of the cultural policy movement, which sublimates critique into forms of governmental engagement that have little or no need for a differentiated aesthetic experience in order think through their cultural politics. At another, we could think about the ways in which the Situationist International abandoned the conception of the artwork in favour of a series of practices (such as the dérive and détournement) that were designed to reconfigure the everyday itself. Given the way the most everyday media forms are transforming the way we think, feel and communicate, these vanishing points may well be where we need to head if we are to hang onto the normative dimension for which literature, as critical theory intimates, was probably only every a placeholder.

Notes 1 For a comprehensive overview of theoretical approaches to the everyday, see Sheringham and Highmore, both of which have been immensely helpful in the writing of this chapter. 2 For more detailed explications of White’s work in relationship to these processes, see McCann, ‘The Ethics of Abjection’; McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia.’ 3 For more expansive discussions of both novels, see McCann, Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique. 4 See Tacey, Edge of the Sacred; Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and McCredden, Intimate Horizons.

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Australian Literature and Everyday Life 5 In ‘The Culture Industry Reconsidered,’ Adorno insists that the culture industry does not ‘strictly counterpose another principle to that of aura.’ Rather it ‘conserves the decaying aura as a foggy mist’ (Adorno, The Culture Industry 88). The idea is already present in Benjamin’s thinking about the auratic (see Benjamin 27).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Ed. J.M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991. Ashcroft, Bill, Frances Devlin-Glass, and Lyn McCredden. Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature. Sydney, NSW: ATF, 2009. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Campbell, Marion May. konkretion. Crawley: UWAP, 2013. Fiske, John, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin, 1987. Frow, John. Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. Sydney, NSW: HarperCollins, 2008. Hartley, John. ‘The Sexualisation of Suburbia: The Diffusion of Knowledge in the Postmodern Public Sphere.’ Visions of Suburbia. Ed. Roger Silverstone. London: Routledge, 1997. 180–216. Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002. Hunter, Ian. ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.’ Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paul A. Treichler. London: Routledge, 1992. 347–372. Johnston, George. My Brother Jack. Sydney, NSW: HarperCollins, 2008. Kendall, Henry. ‘Old Manuscripts.’ Poetry, Prose and Selected Correspondence. Ed. Michael Ackland. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1993. 182–190. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Trans. John Moore and Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2014. Malouf, David. Johnno. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1975. McCann, Andrew. ‘The Ethics of Abjection: Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot.’ Australian Literary Studies 18.2 (1997): 145–155. ———. ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity.’ Australian Literary Studies 18.4 (1998): 56–71. ———. Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique: Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity. London: Anthem, 2015. Rooney, Brigid. Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009. Ross, Kristen. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonisation and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995. Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Tacey, David. Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia. Blackburn, VIC: HarperCollins, 1995. White, Patrick. Patrick White Speaks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990. ———. Riders in the Chariot. London: Vintage, 1996.

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33 EMBLEMATIC SPACES Postcoloniality and the Region Stephanie Green

Arguably, there can be no single Australian literature, just as there is no ‘one’ Australia, as John Kinsella asserts. Rather, there are many Australian literatures, each reflective of their own times and places. As the regions of Australia have been colonised and become diversely populated, the emerging voices of their writers proved themselves to be equally so. Yet, we can say that the literary traditions of modern Australia are linked together in certain ways, not least by the haunting presence of a colonial past. While each region is distinctive and the histories of first contact between original inhabitants and colonists differ in their accounts of speed, intensity and violence, the capture of Australian country and alienation of its traditional inhabitants have left traces in the preoccupations and anxieties of contemporary writing, in ways that continue to call into question the idea of national literary tradition itself. Paul Kane, writing in 1993 with reference to Peter Carey’s fiction, identified the emblematic space between the two words that make up the term ‘Australian Literature’ as a gap that represents the two linked but separate ideas of Australia and its English language literature (521). Recognising this gap is one way, perhaps, of acknowledging ‘the connection between language and history’ that has shaped Australian writing, as ‘a lens through which a people can view themselves and by which others can know them’ (521). Decades later, the multiplicities of perspective that have become yet more complex should also serve to remind us that Australia has a regionally and linguistically diverse heritage, which is marked, nevertheless, by a common colonial history. Margaret Turner argues that the (post)colonial demand for literary tradition rests on ‘the terms of the new culture rather than the old’ in ways that ‘both exhibit and act upon their perceptual and cognitive placement in the new world,’ to interrogate and construct new ways of knowing (16). The very idea of a (post)colonial Australian literature is defined by how we engage with a colonial past which shadows the places, events and characters of Australia’s writing and its production. This is as true for creative works considered to be of a collectively national importance as for those marked out for their regional or vernacular characteristics. Australia’s most internationally recognised writers, for instance, draw on regional themes, cultures and settings (among the many are Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin, Christina Stead, Patrick White, Judith Wright, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, David Malouf, Peter Carey, John Kinsella, Mudrooroo, Christos Tsiolkas, and Alexis Wright). Regional influences continue to dominate our contemporary writing in relation to a heightened awareness of Australia as a (post)colonial society whose wealth has been derived mainly from regional industry production – primarily wool and mining. The unity of the term ‘Australian Literature’ remains problematic, however, in its overwriting of a longer and more diverse cultural

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heritage of First Peoples, whose existence, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth observes, ‘the settler, at the deepest level of their ideology, could not countenance’ (27). The need for recognition of the brutal legacies of colonisation and white occupation is now a well-established theme in Australian writing, particularly notable in fiction that is set in less populated states, such as Tasmania, Western Australia, and Queensland. However, the centuries-old refusal to acknowledge this history continues to shadow contemporary debates about writing and culture. Whether configured within an urban, suburban or rural context, this awareness remains as a kind of haunting which, as Jessica Gildersleeve remarks with reference to Vivienne Cleven’s novel Her Sister’s Eye (2001), expresses ‘the insistent cry of dispossessed populations’ (213). This voicing of the particularity of suffering and loss is widely reflected in Australian fictional narrative. Works by Elizabeth Jolley, Julia Leigh, Andrew McGahan, Kim Scott and others will be referenced in this discussion as examples of writing that reveal the impact of colonialism in regional Australia. Among the layers of influence shared by these works is a prevailing sense of anxiety leading to horror, at least partly situating them within the broader cultural tradition of Australian Gothic. This cultural theme operates in terms of a confrontation between human and non-human forces, within an overwhelming, indeed sublime, sense of the power of country and the destructive force of invasive alienation.

Reading Country in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well Reflecting on the substantial body of criticism that has been written about Jolley’s The Well since its publication in 1986, Dolores Herrero describes the novel as ‘one of the most celebrated examples of the Australian female Gothic’ (201). Herrero focuses her discussion on the multifaceted elaboration of the theme of trauma. This plays out in various ways through Hester’s repressed childhood memory of Hilde’s miscarriage and Katharine’s guilt at the death of an itinerant worker whom she strikes down on the road one dark night as she is driving home through Western Australian farmland. To protect Katharine, Hester attempts to hide this second event, to literally suppress it, by pushing the body into a disused, covered well. Both traumas are metaphors for a deeper anxiety, Herrero points out with reference to Germaine Greer, arising from a legacy of dislocation: ‘Hester’s transgenerational trauma represents that of most white settlers in Australia, since it is “the trauma of never having belonged”’ (215), while the ‘phantom in the well’ is a plea from the silenced voice of the other to be heard (Caruth qtd in Herrero 215). The novel does not make any explicit reference to indigeneity and the itinerant worker is not characterised in any way, except in Katharine’s projected fantasies of his survival. However, in relation to Hester as the landowner’s daughter, the novel deals constantly with matters of land occupation and inheritance, the fragility of possession, female dislocation from a romanticised European heritage, and the mysterious miscarriage of an illegitimate child. The trauma that unsettles the two women leaves a gap in the story, an uncertain and conflicted outcome, that opens the way for other stories to develop and alerts us to the ethical necessity of narratives which may allow us to begin ‘opening ourselves up to the experience of alterity’ (Herrero 214). Intimations of trauma in The Well are never explicit in terms of racial or sexual violence, but awareness of the dislocation imposed on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples by colonisation is certainly implied. As Cornelis Martin Renes observes, the novel leaves off with an open-endedness that may be located in the uncanny absence of a vital Australian link between the body, identity and the land. It is this absence that haunts the Gothic text, inspires the protagonists’ fear by making the familiar strange, and uncannily forestalls closure. (‘Fathoming (Post)Colonial Depths’ 18)

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One of the ways in which Hester begins this opening to new perspectives is the ontological shift she makes when she puts into action her long-held dream of walking through the country. Renes sees this in terms of finding a way to accommodate being in Australia as a white settler. ‘Despite her lameness, towards the end of the novel she tentatively starts out on such a healing journey, which ends with the start of her horror tale’ (17). The engagement with alterity, for Hester, however, is also suggested by her brief encounters with a woman writer – a newcomer to the rural district – who admires her deft consumption of a lamington roll ( Jolley 156). When Hester is challenged to tell her own gothic tale to the Borden children, the writer’s explanation of her project is evoked: ‘a perfectly horrid little drama set, do you see, in a remote corner of the wheat. Very regional’ (156). The literariness of The Well cannot be overlooked, therefore, in terms of authorial engagement with the dialogical momentarity of literary construction. Gerry Turcotte suggests that the novel ‘narrates the variability of story-telling and the relativity of systems of meaning,’ thus problematising authorial authenticity as a strategy for speaking back to ‘a repressive symbolic order’ (200). Delys Bird, similarly, points to the formal experimentation of Jolley’s later work The Orchard Thieves (1995) (122). This is foreshadowed in The Well when the figure of the writer is introduced into the text as a newcomer to the country town, with ambitious notions about how a story might be composed. ‘“I think it’s going to be an epic,” she said. “A sort of contemporary Song of Solomon”’ ( Jolley 156), referring to the love poems of the Old Testament. ‘I am looking for a narrator with experiences,’ she continues, peering closely at Hester with apparent intent (157). At the end of The Well, Hester has indeed gained experiences and a choice of ‘monster stories’ to tell. The novel ends with a short journey home in which she entertains the children of the neighbouring farmers with a story about dark nights and scary monsters (174–176). The scene resonates with the foregoing events of the novel in relation to the figure of the orphaned (possibly mistreated) child, echoing the well-established trope of the literary Gothic tradition. In this vein, the darkness of the story is left unresolved at the novel’s conclusion, foregrounding the devices of its narrativity. The intruder remains in the well, nailed below the surface. The adopted orphan remains trapped in the castle of unknowing. The structure of the story is repeated – but as a ‘jolly’ fictional account of the horror episode when the intruder is struck by the moving vehicle in the night (174–176). Simultaneously, Hester is looking forward to the prospect of another conversation with the woman writer, whose recipe for a scary story she has just adopted and in a sense rewritten for herself. The idea of rewriting always works in other ways in The Well. Maureen Bettle points out that Jolley undertakes a revisioning of female relations in terms of both motherhood and lesbian desire by presenting women who, Bronwen Levy remarks, ‘live insistently at the centre of their own worlds’ (111). The Well captures, further, an ambivalence about white narratives of rural existence which alludes eloquently to the importance of story itself in relation to the past and to future possibility. Stephen Slemon observes that colonialism is inherently complicated, constituted in ambiguity: the condition of (post)coloniality is ‘the space of questioning – itself an effect of colonialist discourse – where colonial subjects become agents of resistance and change’ (24). Levy suggests this stance of ambivalence may be seen as an essential precondition for writing itself in Australia (119). It is also, perhaps, a precondition for white dwelling on a stolen continent.

Unsettling Possession in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth If the use of Gothic tropes to unsettle assumptions of colonial occupation is somewhat implicit in Jolley’s The Well, McGahan’s The White Earth (2004) tackles issues of regionalism and (post)colonial culture in Australia head on. His novel dramatises and interrogates cultural and spatial politics in rural Queensland by engaging clearly identifiable tropes from an established British Gothic 326

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tradition. Told through the eyes of a boy, William, whose maladies are partly caused by his weak, suffering mother, the novel addresses the problems of colonial inheritance and disavowal. At the centre of the story is a crumbling mansion, Kuran House, owned by the McIvor family who long ago appropriated the house and its land from colonial pastoralists aptly named the Whites. None of the generations of Whites are ultimately able to maintain a grasp on the land, which repeatedly unseats their superimposition of a transplanted European rural romanticism. The story is impelled by a dramatic event at the outset, a tractor accident which kills William’s father. Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman interpret this scene as the echo of British imperial brutality which ‘folds its Gothic visions and fantasies into a position on rural settlement that makes its connection to contemporary Australian political realities crystal clear’ (24).The shocked boy witnesses the rising traces of his father’s death above the farm horizon, smoke from the fire caused by the tractor accident. He is dazed, only half able to comprehend what he sees: he looked out from the back verandah and saw, huge in the sky, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. He stared at it, wondering. The thunderhead was dirty black, streaked with billows of grey. It rolled and boiled as it climbed into the clear blue day, casting a vast shadow upon the hills beyond. But there was no sound, no rumble of an explosion. Hot silence lay across the wheat fields, and the air was perfectly still. (McGahan 1) Fire is an important motif in the novel, which McGahan uses to convey the destructiveness of rural industrial occupation and a sense of the power of nature to claim the land back to itself. The tractor fire is the trigger for the story to unfold, as the legacy of white ownership begins to unravel, anticipating the moment when Kuran mansion and the farm’s outbuildings are all burned to the ground. At this moment, Norman Saadi Nikro remarks, ‘history itself seems to be on fire’ (10) and McIvor’s claims of white indigeneity are destroyed, as if by a numinous uprising of the land itself. Emily Potter describes the figure of crumbling Kuran mansion as a metaphor for the legacy of British colonial rule, suggesting that the mansion has become a ‘white ruin’ of colonial aristocratic delusion, containing ‘something hidden and horrible’ (179), occupied by an unrelenting tyrant who dominates a local political group with white supremacist leanings. Kuran station as a whole thus stands for the region’s harsh history of occupation, unsettling McIvor’s already-disintegrating regional political rhetoric of progress built on the pioneer enterprise. The gothicised portrait of the great house in decline, with its ‘dank odour … an underlay of rotting wood’ (McGahan 17), is linked with the novel’s sustained critique of landscape spectatorship as romanticist imposition. Adopting a key characteristic of the (post)colonial Gothic literary mode, the narrative perspective gradually shifts from distanced surveillance to one that is aligned with place and its story (Kulperger 135). Restless and curious, William escapes the confining house and starts to become familiar with the surrounding country. At the same time, he is disorientated by illness and confusion: ‘nothing was solid, not the land, and even less so its history. He had been told so many stories – but which ones was he to believe?’ (McGahan 285). His family loyalties are unsettled by neglect and fevered delirium. As the assumed male heir of the estate, William represents the haunted legacy of white ownership in (post)colonial Australia, since he is a boy too young and too much of a victim himself to accept his inheritance from McIvor, or to shoulder the ethical responsibilities of reconciliation. Indeed, Kerry Munnery points out that another of the key Gothic themes in this novel is the ‘subversion of primogeniture expressed in the theme of usurpation’ (23). At the end of the story, the McIvor family’s grip on the land is released by the rebellious daughter, Ruth, in attempt at generational recompense. William remains a bewildered bystander, seriously damaged by lack of care, but with the possibility of healing and repair. McGahan thus employs key Gothic tropes to 327

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challenge the imperialist imperative of pastoral lament and to counter aestheticised nostalgia for ‘the passing, the dying-out of indigenous subjects’ which, as Nikro observes, still frames some of the ways in which stolen possession is explained away (3). The Gothic renders this perspective itself as haunted by uncanny reminders of ancient habitation and tradition. Katrin Althans reminds us that, as a subversive counter-discourse, the Gothic ‘has long been a means of critiquing the imperial and incorporating local elements to create new cultural modes’ (15). This is a well-established feature of the Gothic, as Katharine Ferguson Ellis explains with reference to traditional British fiction, in which the Gothic mode enabled the contradictions of power to be exposed and addressed (xii). In this way, The White Earth points to ways in which the ideology of whiteness can be, in turn, occupied by the vitality of Australia’s First Peoples, whose culture once more flares through recognition and repair.

Natural Knowing in Julia Leigh’s The Hunter Leigh’s novel The Hunter (1999) also unsettles (post)colonial presumptions of ownership and control through its portrait of a destructive encounter between human and non-human worlds. Primarily set in Tasmanian mountain wilderness, as with The White Earth, this novel also adapts elements of the Gothic to destabilise expectations and to render its critique of species supremacy. The central character, M (Martin David), is in pursuit of the putative last remaining Thylacine, having been commissioned by a biotechnology corporation to bring back the animal’s DNA from Tasmania. The story follows his hunting preparations: special protective clothing and equipment – accoutrements of late twentieth-century bushwalking tourist consumerism – his bush-craft, and his philosophy of never losing sight of the goal. Leigh evokes a strong sense of the ruthless Thylacine hunting campaigns of past generations, and the terrible irony of Martin’s final solo hunt – the damaging imperative entailed in the brutal gathering of genetic capital for corporate gain. The finality of the hunt inevitably echoes Tasmania’s colonial history during the first half of the 1800s, with the mythologies of its Indigenous peoples cast into extinction, associated with a ruthless campaign for the colonial - era Van Diemen’s Land company to take possession of the island’s fertile lands (Ryan 25–44). The rhetorical power of historically specious terms such as ‘the last Indigenous Tasmanian’ still has popular resonance, for example in relation to accounts of Truganini’s life (Morris). Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane have shown, however, that the traditional peoples of Tasmania did not become extinct. They suffered a harsh fate, pursued, captured and exiled to islands in the Furneaux Group, where they survived the early-mid 1800s in small communities. The ‘Tasmanian tiger’ was similarly subjected to an extermination campaign but, even in the remote mountain forest, did not survive. It is this devastating history that Leigh addresses in her novel. The action of The Hunter takes place against the remote regional setting of the Tasmanian high country. The texture of the writing is imbued with a strong sense of locale as Leigh conveys the decaying colonial bluestone cottage where M’s host family reside and the thick mountain bush through which he must negotiate failure and success. Leigh filters her account of M’s determined campaign to kill and capture the last remaining Thylacine through occasional gothic allusion, beginning with the unsettling of the protagonist’s expectations. M has been provided with somewhere to base himself during the hunt by his corporate client, a rented room with a local family among the foothills of the mountains, where he must negotiate unfamiliar beliefs and customs. These are occasionally comical, but unnerving, nonetheless. For instance, as M arrives at the bluestone house where the front door ‘swings open of its own accord. Nobody greets him and he hesitates, baffled; a supernatural door?’ (Leigh 6). The place is in disarray. The vegetarian meal, provided by the children that evening, is different from the kind of food to which he is used. He is momentarily disturbed, unsure of himself. His host does not initially appear, seemingly crazed 328

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by grief. Her husband, Jarrah Armstrong, has disappeared somewhere in the mountains. The children still hope he will be found alive, ‘somewhere up on the plateau,’ as if his disappearance is a spell that could be broken (22). The story is conveyed to M by another hunter, who describes it opaquely as a ‘nasty business’ (12), an uncanny portent that M refuses to accept as he immerses himself in his plans. M is one of a kind, like the surviving Thylacine he pursues: a loner, ‘anchored by neither wife, nor home, nor by a lover nor even a single friend’ (15). His abbreviated appellation, the one lonely letter M, reinforces this sense of isolation from the human community. Chare points to this as a condition of M’s hunting strategy. As a lone hunter he is free to improvise, becoming animal in pursuit of its prey, depending for survival on his bush tucker skills. But this has an uncanny effect, for M can never fully become Other: he cannot give up the goal of possession. His loneliness becomes, rather, an epistemological strategy, a way of discovering, learning and knowing the patterns of the wilderness, all the better to capture the prey for himself. ‘What differentiates M from those thylacine hunters who preceded him is this self-awareness. He knows he too is the last of a breed’ (Chare 146). Although at first he experiences characteristic discomforts of gothic disorientation and displacement as he first enters the challenging landscape, while the Thylacine haunts M like an elusive ghost, by the end of the novel M is beyond empathy or vulnerability, a hunter definitively in possession of himself. Turner’s discussion of the importance of (post)colonial literatures for finding new ‘ways of knowing’ culture and history suggests possibilities for the recasting of literary history itself (15), which, Leigh suggests, are never realised in relation to Tasmanian regionality. Pursuing the Thylacine leads M to inhabit a different epistemology. This shift makes it possible for him to hunt the Thylacine successfully, but he does not fundamentally question the purpose of the hunt or learn new possibilities for a human-animal coexistence. In spite of a moment of prevarication close to the end of the story – clutching at the possibility of a ‘will to failure’ (Leigh 121) – in the full moment of his becoming the hunter he is finally unrelenting as ‘the only one’ who survives (167). He has gone further than anyone before him, but in fact he has gone too far. There is now no possibility of recovery or repair for the Thylacines, or the humans who hunted them to extinction. Fred Botting points to excess as a key characteristic of the Gothic, a trope which also includes boundary anxiety and mental disintegration (1–4). Its generic elements can also serve as a warning, he suggests, of the consequences of transgression. In The Hunter, however, the warning fails. Transgression becomes, at least for M, a condition of being as he refuses the limits of his humanity. Crossing the line, metaphorically, leads M to a pervasive sense of loss. Disasters befall the Armstrong family and the small intimacies and familiarities of his time with them seem just part of a fabric of this loss, as an imperative of his larger enterprise. At a moment of crisis, M turns back towards his prey seeking an unhappy talisman, a ‘reminder not of the way things might be, but the way they really are’ (Leigh 143). The hunt drags on and he loses himself to it. Only then, when he becomes ‘the natural man, who can hear and see and smell what other men cannot’ (161) does the Thylacine appear to him, thin and tattered, nose buried in the blood of its prey, as the novel shudders to its rapid conclusion. In the end, M cherishes nothing. The wilderness is empty to him now, except as a kind of background noise, a medium for discovery, a proof of the hunter’s lonely will to survive. Helen Tiffin has discussed ways in which (post)colonial literatures entail a ‘refusal of finality,’ a rejection of a totalising colonial impost on occupied and appropriated traditional cultures (29). Here, Leigh does not set out to offer a recuperative account of the exploitative force of (post) colonial ideology. She does not use the Gothic merely as parody, nor to unsettle the apparatus of remote corporate power. Rather, she subsumes alienated horror within the ontological condition of colonial definition. For Leigh, in the context of Tasmanian extinction, there is no (post) 329

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colonial possibility, no refiguration of the imperial project that can lead to repair. The only possible outcome of colonial invasion, at least for the Thylacine, is death. Slemon reminds us that the discourses of (post)colonialism are themselves ideological and that academic territoriality can be seen as part of an ongoing facet of adaptive colonisation (15–44). In The Hunter, M’s attitude to the hunt suggests a contemporary colonialist subject position, but the questioning entailed in the shift from imperialist excess to the ambiguity of a hybrid (post)colonial identity never fully arises. Leigh has been criticised for her apparent critique of regional identity (Flanagan qtd in Brewer), but the thrust of Leigh’s critique is not urban arrogance directed at regional in/difference. Rather, The Hunter sets up an ideological apparatus that is imbued with assumptions of human species supremacy and dismantles it by example, exposing ‘both place and ecological consciousness to their shared limit in extinction’ (Brewer).

Non-Coloniality: The Need for First Peoples Perspectives Leigh’s novel is less optimistic, perhaps, than Jolley’s or McGahan’s, yet together these works speak clearly from a white (post)colonial perspective. They offer glimpses of critical possibility for ways of knowing and understanding Australia’s dominant culture and history after first- and second-wave colonisation. However, it is the work of major Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors, such as Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, among others, which perhaps most successfully demonstrate the importance of non-colonial ways of knowing through writing. Both Scott’s Benang (1999) and Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) tell stories of familial/cultural inheritance, shifting the perspective of white presumption and ‘making space for the coexistence of multiple ontologies and epistemologies’ (Slater 38), to produce a sense of ‘Indigenous belonging that is not fixed within a colonialist reiteration’ (Griffiths 171). Benang works through shifting perspectives, polyphony, discontinuous or nonlinear narrative elements, breaking away from literary realism to convey a complexly confronting story which, as Renes points out with reference to Homi K. Bhabha, ‘may be seen to circulate publicly as a token of “strange cultural survival” within the historical, linguistic, racial and gendered margins of the Australian land and text-scape’ (‘Kim Scott’s Fiction’ 184–185). Significantly, as a story of place, he adds, Benang ‘refuses to acknowledge an overarching White patriarchal narrative that organises kinship relations according to the hierarchical rigidities and sequencing of oedipal conflict; instead, it simultaneously speaks to the past, present and future of Aboriginality’ (187). Wright’s Carpentaria is similarly complex: five hundred pages of labyrinthine narrative that opens onto one scene and then onto another, one story folded between others as if in parenthesis. Past and present intermingle in the space of a page or even less: time expands into the cracks and crevices of the here-and-now. (Ravenscroft 205) It is a novel of encounters between two traditions which are incomprehensible to each other, told from multiple, complexly interrelated, points of view. In Wright’s novel, the lived, dreamed and imagined experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander characters are woven together to make one fabric of knowing and understanding, while the colonists have arrived like empty ghosts with ‘no name and no memory’ dreams to haunt their ancient places, disrupting family relationships and traditions. (203). Wright’s fiction portrays colonisation in Australia as an ongoing failure to address brutality and injustice, an ideology that, especially for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, remains a present force. Kinsella’s stance against the notion of a canonical Australian literature, referenced at the outset of this discussion, is founded on a similar recognition of the problem posed by a collective national identity: who we are as a nation, he observes, 330

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‘is often violent, racist, environmentally destructive, and collectively, thieves.’ Each of the novels discussed here is set in regional Australia – Darling Downs, Carpentaria, the south of Western Australia, rural Tasmania – and as this discussion shows in each the legacy of colonial invasion continues to resonate. As the new creative writers of Australia begin to ask the question ‘who are we’ for themselves, it is worth keeping in mind the poet Lionel Fogarty’s words, ‘something must tell / Am I me or you am us’ (‘Am I’ lines 32–33).

Works Cited Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht Unipress, 2010. Bettle, Maureen. ‘Dr Thorne and Mrs Peabody: Miss Peabody’s Inheritance.’ Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. Ed. Delys Bird and Brenda Walker. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1991. 121–130. Bird, Delys. ‘Elizabeth Jolley’s Late Work.’ Australian Literary Studies 24.1 (2009): 121–133. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 2005. Brewer, Scott Robert. ‘“A Peculiar Aesthetic”: Julia Leigh’s The Hunter and Sublime Loss.’ JASAL spec. iss. (2009). . Chare, Nicholas. ‘After the Thylacine: In Pursuit of Cinematic and Literary Improvised Encounters with the Extinct.’ Liminalities 14.1 (2018): 125–168. Ellis, Katharine Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1989. Fogarty, Lionel. New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera. Melbourne, VIC: Hyland House, 1995. Gelder, Ken and Paul Salzman. After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2009. Gildersleeve, Jessica. ‘Trauma, Memory and Landscape in Queensland: Women Writing “a New Alphabet of Moss and Water.”’ Queensland Review 19.2 (2012): 205–216. Griffiths, Michael R. ‘Need I Repeat? Settler Colonial Biopolitics and (Post)Colonial Iterability in Kim Scott’s Benang.’ (Post)Colonial Issues in Australian Literature. Ed. Nathanael O’Reilly. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2010. 129–156. Heiss, Anita, and Peter Minter. ‘Aboriginal Literature.’ The Literature of Australia. Ed. Nicholas Jose. New York: WW Norton, 2009. 7–13. Herrero, Dolores. ‘The Phantom and Transgenerational Trauma in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well.’ Cross/Cultures 145 (2012): 201–216. Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony. ‘For a Long Time Nothing Happened: Settler Colonialism, Deferred Action and the Scene of Colonisation in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance.’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51.1 (2016): 22–34. Johnson, Murray, and Ian McFarlane. Van Diemen’s Land: An Aboriginal History. Sydney: UNSW P, 2015. Jolley, Elizabeth. The Well. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin, 1986. Kane, Paul. ‘(Post)Colonial/Postmodern: Australian Literature and Peter Carey.’ World Literature Today 67.3 (1993): 519–522. Kinsella, John. ‘An Australian Canon Will Only Damage Australian Literature.’ Guardian 8 Mar. 2012. . Kulperger, Shelley. ‘Familiar Ghosts: Feminist Postcolonial Gothic in Canada.’ Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and Postcolonial Gothic. Ed. Cynthia Sugar and Gerry Turcotte. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2009. 97–124. Leigh, Julia. The Hunter. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin, 1999. Levy, Bronwen. ‘Jolley’s Women.’ Australian Literary Studies 24.1 (2009): 111–120. McGahan, Andrew. The White Earth. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2004. Morris, Lulu. ‘The Last Indigenous Tasmanian.’ National Geographic Australia 8 May 2017. . Munnery, Kerry. The Mirror House: Writing the Uncanny into the Australian Suburban Home. Unpublished MA diss. RMIT, 2012. Nikro, Norman Saadi. ‘Pitching Ethical Resonance: Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth.’ JASAL 13.3 (2014). . Potter, Emily. ‘Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth and the Ecological Poetics of Memory.’ Antipodes 20.2 (2006): 177–182. Ravenscroft, Alison. ‘Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics.’ Cultural Studies Review 16.2 (2010): 194–224.

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Stephanie Green Renes, Cornelis Martin. ‘Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well: Fathoming (Post)Colonial Depths in the Female Gothic.’ Australian Studies 1 (2009): 1–20. ———. ‘Kim Scott’s Fiction within Western Australian Life-Writing: Voicing the Violence of Removal and Displacement.’ Coolabah 9 (2013): 177–189. Ryan, Lyndall. ‘The Australian Agricultural Company, the Van Diemen’s Land Company: Labour Relations with Aboriginal Landowners, 1824–1835.’ Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession Around the Pacific Rim. Ed. Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 25–44. Scott, Kim. Benang. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle P, 1999. Slater, Lisa. ‘The Land Holds All Things: Kim Scott’s Benang: A Guide to (Post)Colonial Spatiality.’ A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott. Ed. Belinda Wheeler. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016. 37–48. Slemon, Stephen. ‘The Scramble for (Post)Colonialism.’ De-Scribing Empire. Ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London: Routledge, 2004. 27–44. Tiffin, Helen. ‘Recuperative Strategies in the (Post)Colonial Novel.’ Span 24 (1987): 27–45. Turner, Margaret. Imagining Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1995. Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria. Sydney, NSW: Giramondo, 2006.

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Genre in Australian Literary Studies

34 TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AUSTRALIAN POETRY Sarah Holland-Batt and Ella Jeffery

Is contemporary Australian poetry presently experiencing a golden age or in its death throes? These two polemical views have dominated recent coverage of the form, citing either the surge in popularity of live forms such as slam and performance poetry, or the contracting numbers of poetry publishers as evidence. While reports of the demise of Australian poetry are greatly exaggerated, so too are those heralding its renaissance. Arguably, poetry has always been a marginal form in Australian literature, yet in spite of its marginality – or perhaps because of it – it persists. In surveying contemporary Australian poetry, we define the contemporary era as poetry written and published since the year 2000. This period has been one of geopolitical instability and seismic change, including cataclysmic events such as 9/11, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), as well as the rapid rise of the digital age and technological advances in artificial intelligence and automation. Australia’s geographical isolation as an island continent and its relative insulation from the GFC have meant that global volatility has not affected Australia as acutely as it has elsewhere. Perhaps as a consequence, Australian poets on the whole have not engaged with these global events with the same intensity as poets elsewhere in the Anglosphere, although well into the second decade of the millennium, politically attuned poetry is undoubtedly gaining traction among emerging poets. Digital platforms initially seemed to promise a radical transformation in both reading and writing practices, yet, 20 years on, the effect on literature has been negligible, and print remains the dominant format for the dissemination and consumption of poetry in Australia. The rise of electronic journals, podcasts, and YouTube has delivered poetry to new audiences, but its core readership remains committed to the book. The well-documented shift in Australian poetry publishing that took place in the 1990s when major publishing houses abandoned their poetry lists to boutique, independent, and university presses (Lea, ‘Trends in Poetry Publishing’) has proven permanent. But while the contemporary period is easily demarcated, the question of what defines Australian poetry as Australian is more complex. In the past, there has been a tendency for Australian poets and critics to define the field in oppositional terms, pitting generations and schools against one another, or turning overseas in order to define Australian poetry as a lack of what resides in other traditions. This chapter eschews these internecine polemics of the ‘poetry wars’ in favour of a holistic view that seeks to define contemporary poetry via its most prominent subjects and concerns, discernable critical trends and movements, and the demographic and generational change that has occurred since the end of the twentieth century. One significant shift that marks the contemporary period is that Australian poetry no longer looks so dependently towards the United 335

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Kingdom or the United States in order to define itself as an antipodean counterweight to its international counterparts; as Australian poetry enters into maturity, the answer to what defines it increasingly resides at home.

Landscape, Dwelling, and Place In her seminal text Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965), Judith Wright identified the anxiety of describing and comprehending the Australian landscape as the definitive idée fixe in Australian settler poetry. ‘Australia is not yet wholly our country of the mind,’ Wright argued, ‘because we have not yet understood and interpreted our relation to her’ (xix). Wright’s provocation to poets – to ‘look as closely as we can,’ at the landscape, ‘for the past holds the clue to the present’ (xix) – has guided the trajectory of Australian poetry for the past half-century, which still reveals in its contemporary iterations an enduring fixation with describing the environment and landscapes both urban and rural, anxieties about Australia’s colonial past and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and an ongoing interrogation of ideas of home and belonging by Indigenous, settler, and migrant poets alike. One response from many leading contemporary poets to Wright’s charge has been the development of a regional poetics, which seeks to illuminate the macrocosm via the microcosm. This tendency towards regionalism is arguably a response to the sheer scale and geographical variance of the Australian continent – which encompasses diverse ecological zones, from arid deserts to the tropics, island archipelagos, and the bush through to the Australian Antarctic Territory – as well as a significant chasm between rhythms of urban and rural life. This divide between Australia’s metropolitan and regional centres was extrapolated most famously by Les Murray in his essay, ‘On Sitting Back and Thinking About Porter’s Boeotia’ (1978), about Peter Porter’s poem, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’ (1975), where Murray distinguishes between Athenian and Boeotian impulses in Australian poetry: the former animated by imperialism, rationalism, internationalism, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and the avant garde, and the latter animated by the pastoral, local, patriotic, rural, traditional, dreaming, ‘backward’ mind. This schism posited by Murray uses the analogy of Athens and Boeotia to describe a divide in Australian thinking along postcolonial lines: that there are poets who look overseas, to England, to Europe or America, to the city, urban life, and to the international movements and schools for inspiration – and those who attempt to create a poetics whose locus resides at home. While these distinctions have become somewhat blunted in the decades following, Murray’s influence in claiming a divide between the avant garde or experimental poetics and a more traditional poetics has more or less endured, maintained – at times polemically – by poets on both sides of this dichotomy. Murray’s corpus and ideas have proven highly consequential for generations of Australian poets. Murray’s gaze was both local and international, yet he was best known as Australia’s ‘bush laureate’; he made a life’s work of surveying Bunyah and the farmland of inland New South Wales, forging a distinctive and muscular colloquial language to explore the landscape and values associated with Australian rural life, writing from the philosophical standpoint that ‘any distinctiveness we possess is still firmly anchored in the bush’ (Paperbark Tree 61). Central to the creation of this ‘vernacular republic,’ in Murray’s coinage, is what Murray described as a Boeotian impulse ‘to list and name’ (The Peasant Mandarin 174) – that is, to claim a knowledge and affinity with the landscape through the generative force of linguistic invention. Jaya Savige has recently argued that this tendency towards compulsive description, enumeration, and naming that endures, most markedly among Australian lyric poets, derives not only from the desire ‘to communicate (with) the ineffable’ but, fundamentally, as a settler reaction to the perceived silence of the autochthonous Australian landscape (174). Murray’s combative insistence on the primacy of rural life as the 336

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lynchpin of Australian national identity – as well as his ideas about the desirability of synthesis between white and black poetic cultures – has been both influential and furiously contested by contemporary poets, but nonetheless remains a distinguishing marker against which Australian poets test their ideas of place and belonging. South of Murray’s Bunyah, Robert Adamson adopts the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney as his poetic locus, envisaging the estuarine world as a staging ground for frequently symbolic encounters – both benign and violent – between human and animal worlds, and a figure for the tidal flux of self hood. While Adamson’s earlier work may have been received fundamentally as ‘a poetry of epiphanies in the face of nature’ (Craven), the work he has produced this millennium, including The Goldfinches of Baghdad, (2006), has developed into a ‘distinctive brand of mysticism’ (Page) dwelling with human myth, especially that of Orpheus and Eurydice, complementing the poet’s enduring focus on ‘the naturally savage and violent world of animal life’ (Ryan). For Adamson, the Hawkesbury remains a liminal space in which boundaries between the self and natural world commingle and dissolve in moments of Romantic apprehension, and the landscape itself is often conceived of using metaphors of writing, script, and language, suggesting that the self not only composes the landscape, but is always in the process of being written and revised by it in return. On the west coast of the continent, John Kinsella continues to make an exhaustive project of chronicling the wheatbelt region east of Perth where, in an antipodean iteration of Henry Thoreau’s Walden (1854), the poet moved with his family in order to ‘live deliberately’ (46). Kinsella’s poetry – underpinned by a radical ecocritical philosophy and anti-pastoral stance – finds its epicentre in his home, Jam Tree Gully, and the region it sits in in Western Australia, from cataloguing and mapping the flora, fauna, and geographical features of the region, to interrogating environmental depredations by its human inhabitants. Kinsella’s recent works, including On the Outskirts (2017), Jam Tree Gully (2012), and Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008), visit and revisit the ‘interaction between being “at home” and being “away”’ (Duwell, ‘John Kinsella’), while his more experimental three-volume Graphology Poems (2016) examines the unhomeliness of language itself, interrogating the written word’s capacity to capture and distort perceptions of landscape, self, and time. For Kinsella, landscape and language are intertwined, and the endless possibilities of linguistic utterance are juxtaposed by the threatened existence of the natural world they are employed to represent. Kinsella is the most prominent poet in a burgeoning strand of Australian ecocritical and anti-pastoral poetry that also includes poets such as Martin Harrison, Peter Minter, Stuart Cooke, Caroline Caddy, Anne Elvey, Michael Brennan, Mark Tredinnick, John Watson, and Phillip Hall; such a poetics most broadly is interested in exploring the ethical implications of the relationship between humans, the non-human, and the environment. For some poets, this ecocritical stance includes an activist dimension seeking to agitate for greater awareness of environmental crises such as deforestation, climate change, coral bleaching, and species extinction, as well as contending with the dispossession of the land’s Indigenous custodians stemming from the doctrine of terra nullius, most recently exemplified by Kinsella and Indigenous poet Charmaine Papertalk Green’s jointly written, dialogic volume False Claims of Colonial Thieves (2018). Prominent lyricists whose works are weighted towards the non-human world but mostly eschew the overt politics of some ecocritical modes include Judith Beveridge and Anthony Lawrence, both of whom focus on the forensic observation of the predation and violence in the natural world, and the frequently savage interplay between humans and animals. Beveridge’s poems place an especially strong emphasis on both the image and the role that language plays in interpreting the natural world; they engage with etymology and the music of language, mostly eschewing the autobiographical lyric speaker in favour of masks and dramatis personae. Lawrence’s body of work frequently stages dramatic encounters with the natural world, especially in littoral landscapes, 337

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wherein the Sturm und Drang of the ocean and the violent intertwining of animal and human worlds often mirror the poet’s dramatic interior states. Contemporary Indigenous poets including Lionel G. Fogarty, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Ellen van Neerven, and Jeanine Leane reckon with the legacy of colonial violence and the dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands, countering white narratives and histories with a flourishing body of work that frequently emphasises survival, defiance, and endurance. Fogarty’s poetry stresses the primacy of his Murri worldview primarily through the torsion of language; his highly energetic poems disrupt standard forms of English for a galvanising creole that pushes language to the border of intelligibility, undermining and repurposing conventional syntax for his own ends. Eckermann’s corpus documents the poet’s firsthand experiences as a member of the Stolen Generation, wherein Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their parents and country. In Leane’s work, the Murrumbidgee River and her home region of southwestern New South Wales are a source of ancestral knowledge and power stretching back over 40,000 years to Mungo Lady (the oldest human remains found on mainland Australia), but are also irrevocably altered by damaging assimilationist policies. The inner-city and suburban settings of van Neerven’s Comfort Food (2016) are sites of alienation and connection, in which the individual endlessly seeks some form of connection – erotic, familial, ancestral, or geographical – in quotidian spaces, including grocery stores and bakeries, as well as at family gatherings. While the bush and the continent’s interior was the dominant setting of early Australian poetry and bush ballads, the beach is perhaps the foremost setting in contemporary Australian poetry, especially among lyric poets. The coastline looms large in the Australian imaginary not only because, as C.A. Cranston and Robert Zeller note, it is the site of first contact between white colonisers and Indigenous people (7), but also because it is home to the vast majority of Australians. Alongside Anthony Lawrence, other major poets focused on the littoral include Robert Gray – well known for his imagistic pastoral poems – who returns compulsively to the landscape of Sydney harbour and its bays and beaches, and Savige, whose latecomers (2005) is situated on the beaches of Bribie Island, which are haunted by both brutal frontier conflicts and the shadow of the Second World War. West Australian poet Caitlin Maling’s Fish Song (2019) and Michelle Cahill’s The Herring Lass (2016) both examine the ways in which relationships, personal and public history are embedded in and symbolised by tumultuous coastal landscapes. In counterpoint to the natural landscapes that predominate in Australian poetry, an increasing number of Australian poets locate their work in the metropolis, reflecting the fact that, as of the 2016 census, two thirds of Australians live in capital cities (Commonwealth Government of Australia). While he divides his time between Australia and Italy, Queenslander David Malouf ’s omphalos remains the state’s capital of Brisbane, and its lush subtropical gardens and airy Queenslander houses. John Tranter, equally at home in New York as Malouf is in Italy, returns again and again to Sydney’s harbour as his backdrop. Urban and suburban settings feature prominently in many recent collections, where seemingly mundane and deliberately unpoetic sites such as cafes, shopping malls, public parks, and suburban streets reveal the domestic and quotidian aspects of Australian life. Increasingly, poets are applying a critical gaze to this Australian suburban idyll. Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson contends with the haunted and haunting history of Brisbane’s West End, a site of long Indigenous history subjected to recent widespread gentrification. Recent collections such as Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior (2017) and Keri Glastonbury’s Newcastle Sonnets (2018) highlight the tensions of living outside the middle-class mean, and ПO’s Fitzroy: A Biography (2015), Eileen Chong’s Painting Red Orchids (2016), Eunice Andrada’s Flood Damages (2018), Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries (2019), Cahill’s Vishvarūpa (2011), Lachlan Brown’s Lunar Inheritance (2017), and Omar Sakr’s The Lost Arabs (2019) explore the experiences of migrants in Australian cities and the complexities of notions of home, belonging, and diaspora for those with a footprint in more than one country. 338

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Others yet, including Petra White, observe the corporate environment – a key dwelling place of late capitalism – with a wry eye. As Cahill has argued, Australian poetry and poetics increasingly show a transnational bent, evinced by the emergence of numerous journals that focus on hybrid and transcultural identities and literatures, including Liminal Magazine, Peril Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, and others, as well as Vagabond Press’s Asia-Pacific series, which has introduced translations of a broad range of poets from the Asia-Pacific region to Australian poetry. Poets who have pioneered this subject matter in Australian poetry include Ouyang Yu and Kim Cheng Boey. More recently, collections by Brown, Adam Aitken, Ivy Alvarez, and Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng examine notions of home, alienation, and exile in their work, which frequently spans more than two continents. Aitken’s Eighth Habitation (2009) ranges through Indonesia, Cambodia, China, Thailand, and Australia, drawing on a Buddhist conception of purgatory, and Brown’s Limited Cities (2012) and Lunar Inheritance traverse Paris and Barcelona as well as the poet’s unearthing of family history in Shanghai and Sydney. As these and other works demonstrate, while contemporary Australian poetry maintains its fascination with landscape and place, the distinction between what Murray and Porter once debated as ‘country poetry and town poetry’ (Porter and Anderson 39) is eroding with the rise of the suburban as a poetic subject, and the rise of poetic voices who hold more than one simultaneous notion of home.

The Interdisciplinary Turn No longer monopolised by duelling cultural capitals Melbourne and Sydney, Australian poetic activity has decentralised with the advent of the internet and the rise of regional capitals, but arguably in the current period it finds its principal home in the academy. While many of Australia’s leading twentieth-century poets taught literature in university settings, the connection between the disciplines of creative writing and literary studies was formalised with the introduction of ­creative writing programmes into the university in the 1980s. Statistics compiled by the Australian Association of Writing Programs in 2010 show that whereas in 1999 there were eight PhD offerings in creative writing available around Australia, that number had grown significantly by 2010, when 25 doctoral programmes in Australia and New Zealand were on offer. Since then, the number of programmes has continued to rise significantly, so that creative writing is now represented at undergraduate, postgraduate, and diploma levels at almost all tertiary institutions in Australia: as of 2020, 40 of the 43 accredited universities in Australia have creative writing courses, majors, and degrees at either or both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. One product of the institutionalisation of creative writing as an academic discipline, and the high number of both emerging and established Australian poets studying for doctorates, masters, and undergraduate degrees alike, has been the influence of academic research culture on Australian poetry. Australian postgraduate writing programmes in particular have placed the onus on poets to theorise their work, and to think of creative practice as research; the corollary of this shift has been the advent of interdisciplinary poetry that increasingly seeks to connect with other fields of academic research and its discourses. One prominent strand of interdisciplinary Australian poetry that has coincided with increasing numbers of poets in the academy is that of ekphrasis, a mode that links poetry to the discipline of art history. Alongside traditional ekphrastic subjects drawn from the visual and plastic arts such as paintings and sculptures, contemporary Australian ekphrastic poetry now encompasses poems about photography, as well as non-static texts such as film, music, video and performance art, and other mediums. The contemporary Australian interest in ekphrastic poems, led by poets such as Peter Steele and Peter Boyle, ranges over an array of ekphrastic subjects: poets such as Stephen Edgar, David McCooey, and Carmen Leigh Keates are concerned with film, whereas Aitken, 339

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Lucy Dougan, L.K. Holt, Kate Middleton, Luke Beesley, Simon West, Paul Hetherington, Elizabeth Campbell, and Susan Fealy engage with fine art, such as painting, photography, and sculpture. Others yet, such as Bella Li and Amanda Stewart, incorporate drawings, collage, and other forms of visual art practice into the presentation of their poems. Australian poets are also increasingly drawn to revisiting – and at times critiquing from feminist, queer, and Indigenous perspectives – history and the archive. Natalie Harkin establishes a decolonising archival poetics in Dirty Words (2015), critiquing colonial ontologies by drawing on and reclaiming the language and format of archival records documenting the lives of ­Indigenous domestic workers in South Australia. Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork (2018) – a hybrid text that draws upon diverse modes such as legal documentation, reportage, memoir, and fiction, as well as lyric poetry – critiques both the pernicious narratives of ‘discovery’ that form the basis of Indigenous dispossession and the ways in which language itself has been wielded as is a tool of oppression against Indigenous Australians. Eckermann’s verse novel, Ruby Moonlight (2012), charts an encounter between a young Indigenous woman recovering from the massacre of her family and a lone European trapper, joining other prominent twenty-first-century practitioners of the form, including Dorothy Porter, Alan Wearne, Omar Musa, Judy Johnson, and Geoff Page, as well as recent satirical and mock-epic turns such as Brian Castro’s Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria (2017) and Justin Clemens’s The Mundiad (2013) although, as Bronwyn Lea has noted, overall there are indications that enthusiasm for the verse novel is waning (‘Australian Poetry Now’ 188). Jordie Albiston’s The Book of Ethel (2013) and Jessica Wilkinson’s marionette: a biography of miss marion davies (2012) and Suite for Percy Grainger (2014) are prominent examples of verse biography, an emergent form that uses poetry to disrupt biographical discourse. A different but complementary strand of contemporary poetry focuses on non-fiction poetry, a term that, at its most succinct, denotes poetry that ‘realise[s] and enact[s] factual content’ (Wilkinson and Alizadeh). Andy Jackson’s Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold (2017), for example, charts the experiences of people who live with Marfan Syndrome, drawing on both historical accounts and personal interviews to provide a multi-faceted portrait of the condition. The interdisciplinary turn in contemporary Australian poetry is not limited to poetry’s sister disciplines in the humanities. Poets including Albiston, Peter Goldsworthy, R.A. Briggs, Tricia Dearborn, and Shastra Deo range across the disciplines of science, chemistry, mathematics, and medicine; others approach the medical from a personal standpoint, writing themselves into the poem’s frame, such as Joel Deane, Rhyll McMaster, and Quinn Eades. Poetry’s turn towards the medical humanities is the subject of the recent anthology Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain (2017), edited by Heather Taylor Johnson, which spans illness, disability, trauma, and chronic conditions. Others yet, such as Lisa Gorton in Press Release (2007) and Lisa Jacobson in her verse novel The Sunlit Zone (2012), look to science fiction and futurism to illuminate the present – even if the vision, as it is in Maria Takolander’s The End of the World (2014), is apocalyptic. At the same time that Australian poetry has found a home in the academy, forms of spoken word such as slam and performance poetry continue to grow, and their practitioners have attained greater prominence and recognition as these genres have surged in popularity. Drawing on rhetorical devices such as repetition, refrain, and the frequent use of rhyme, spoken word is a hybrid form that incorporates elements of oral storytelling, theatre, and blues poetry, as well improvisatory musical genres of jazz, rap, and hip-hop. The recent print anthology Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word (2019) collects many of the major practitioners of these forms, including Musa, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Miles Merrill, Luka Lesson, and the late Candy Royalle, and claims spoken word as a democratising force. Many of the poets included in this anthology have also published print volumes with poetry presses, suggesting that there is greater cross-over between performative and print poetry than there has been in the past. Spoken word, as the editors note, is often inflected with politics and social justice, and explores questions of identity, race, 340

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gender, belonging, and marginalisation, aiming to connect with audiences in accessible, rhetorical language (Stavanger and Te Whiu xviii).

Looking Outwards and Looking In McCooey has argued that Australian literary history, especially its poetry criticism, has been wracked by a false dichotomy regarding its international locus of influence: ‘the old arguments about British or American influence seem passé’ (‘Surviving Australian Poetry’ 66), McCooey writes, arguing for greater attentiveness to Australian poetry’s ‘worldliness’ rather than seeking linear genealogies of influence from the narrow Anglosphere. Adopting this perspective, we seek here to trace some of the manifold loci of worldly influence in Australian poetry – as well as to grapple with Australia’s influence, or lack thereof, outwards. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the UK exerted the greatest draw for Australian poets, attracting generations who travelled to London to make contact with the poetry establishment; several, including most prominently Porter and Clive James, stayed; in the new millennium, several contemporary Australian poets have continued this trajectory, including Savige, Emma Jones, and Claire Potter. But while the British influence on Australian poetry is still felt through adherence to rhyme and traditional forms in the works of Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Page, James, Porter, and others, the younger generation located in the UK show less influence of any particularly British qualities, suggesting that the British influence on contemporary Australian poetry – even that of Australian poets residing in England – is ebbing. With the rise of the Generation of ’68, who took cues from the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, the pendulum swung towards America, and an urbane, experimental, and ironic postmodern mode of poetry began to flourish in Australia in the latter half of the twentieth century. While the usefulness of these generational parameters has been contested, and the cohesiveness of the poets coming under the Generation of ’68 umbrella was loose from the beginning – taking in the stylish, ironic poems of Tranter, Gig Ryan and John Forbes, the readymade bricolaged aesthetics of Ken Bolton and Laurie Duggan, but also the politically charged works of Jennifer Maiden and the philosophical corpus of J.S. Harry, and the romantically inflected poems of Adamson, among others – the ’68ers demonstrated a shared interest in ironising language, a style freed of the strictures of rhyme and traditional forms, disjunctive syntax, ludic experimentation, self-referentiality, a suspicion of the unified speaker of lyric poetry, and an ‘aesthetics of impermanence’ (McCooey, ‘Contemporary Australian Poetry’ 162) and ambivalence. A recent anthology edited by poet and critic Michael Farrell, Ashbery Mode (2019), shows the degree to which Ashbery’s influence in particular endures among a diverse cohort of Australian poets well beyond the Generation of ’68, suggesting that, as Martin Duwell notes, although Ashbery’s presence in Australian poetry may have been inaugurated with John Forbes’s Honours thesis, it has persisted for more than half a century (‘Michael Farrell’). In some instances – such as Tranter’s long Ashbery terminal, ‘The Anaglyph’ (2010), or Farrell’s poems in thempark (2010), which follow word count and punctuation constraints derived from Ashbery poems – the influence is expressed structurally as well as aesthetically, literally shaping the poem with the ghost print of Ashbery’s. Of course, many of these features that were expounded as definitive of the Generation of ’68 extend beyond the bounds of the initial grouping: poets ranging across generations who all show a similar commitment to linguistic disjunction, syntactical playfulness, pastiche, the juxtaposition of high and low culture, formal experimentation – and, at times, self-imposed constraints – include Farrell, Pam Brown, Ann Vickery, Michael Farrell, Astrid Lorange, Aidan Coleman, A.J. Carruthers, Bonny Cassidy, and Corey Wakeling, among others. The impulse towards contemporaneity and playfulness that unites these very different experimental poets has become 341

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central in Australian poetry, even if it is now firmly untethered to notions of generational change. Interestingly, many experimental poets also pursue formal constraint as a key element of their practice – either through experimentation with existing forms, as Dan Disney does in his book of experimental villanelles, either, Orpheus (2016) and Farrell does with the sonnet in open sesame (2015), and chance, such as using dice or computer generation methods, or through self-imposed constraints, including found and erasure poetry, and cut-ups. Contra the restrictive debate about American and British influences, Australian poets today look further than the Anglosphere – as was ever thus – for poetic touchstones. The influence of French surrealist and Dadaist poetics is strongly felt in the work of Toby Fitch, who draws impetus from Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Peter Boyle takes his cue from the pluralistic Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in devising the heteronymic poetics of Ghostspeaking (2016). Simon West, a translator and an Italianist as well as a poet, not only draws on the influence of Italian poets and poetics, but also frequently sets his poems in Italian landscapes. Aitken’s Archipelago (2017) – centring on the poet’s experiences living and marrying in France – also traces French influences on Australian poetry. M.T.C. Cronin’s Talking to Neruda’s Questions (2001) is a volume in dialogue with the questions and provocations of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions (1974). Poet and critic Stuart Cooke has argued for a simpatico between Australian and Chilean postcolonial poetics in work of literary scholarship, Speaking the Earth’s Languages (2013), and pursued a trans-Pacific poetics in Opera (2016), which tracks exchange across opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. The influence of French poetics is also evident in the growing interest in prose poetry in Australia, although the form in its current iteration departs radically from the traditions established by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé, and instead draws its principal influences from American proponents such as Russell Edson and Charles Simic. Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton remain the most notable practitioners of the prose poem in Australia, and their forthcoming anthology, The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, attests to the developing, if still marginal, place the form holds among an increasing cohort of poets, including Jen Webb, Varatharajan, van Neerven, and Wagan Watson. Yet while Australian poets continue to look to the world for influence, the world has been slow to turn to Australian poetry. There are signs that this is slowly shifting; in the past few years, special issues of several major American poetry journals have been dedicated to Australian poetry, including Poetry and The Kenyon Review, as well as a number of internationally published anthologies of Australian poetry, too, suggesting that while Australian poetry has always looked outwards, the world may finally be beginning to return the gaze.

Works Cited ‘About the Australian Association of Writing Programs.’ Australian Association of Writing Programs. Nd. . Cahill, Michelle. ‘The Poetics of Subalternity.’ Mascara Literary Review 23 May 2012. . Commonwealth Government of Australia. ‘2016 Census: National Capital Cities.’ Australian Bureau of Statistics. Nd. . Cranston, C.A., and Robert Zeller, ed. The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and Their Writers. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Craven, Peter. ‘Rev. The Clean Dark by Robert Adamson.’ Australian Book Review 116 (1989). . Duwell, Martin. ‘Rev. John Kinsella: On the Outskirts.’ Australian Poetry Review 1 Aug. 2017. . ———. ‘Rev. Michael Farrell, ed., Ashbery Mode; David Stavanger and Anne-Marie Te Whiu, ed., Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word.’ Australian Poetry Review 1 Mar. 2020. . Lea, Bronwyn. ‘Trends in Poetry Publishing: 1995–2008.’ Five Bells 15.4 (2009): 61–64. ———. ‘Australian Poetry Now.’ Poetry 208.2 (2016): 185–191. McCooey, David. ‘Contemporary Poetry: Across Party Lines.’ The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Webby. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 158–182. ———. ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism.’ Blue Dog: Australian Poetry 4.7 (2005): 62–70. Murray, Les. The Peasant Mandarin: Prose Pieces. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1978. ———. Persistence in Folly. London: Sirius, 1984. ———. The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose. Manchester: Carcanet, 1992. Page, Geoff. ‘Robert Adamson Review: Autobiography at the Core of His New Poems.’ Sydney Morning Herald 16 May 2015. . Porter, Peter, and Don Anderson. ‘Country Poetry and Town Poetry: A Debate With Les Murray.’ Australian Literary Studies 9.1 (1979): 39–48. Ryan, Gig. ‘Catcher and Sifter: Net Needle by Robert Adamson.’ Sydney Review of Books 24 Nov. 2015. . Savige, Jaya. ‘“Creation’s Holiday”: On Silence and Monsters in Australian Poetry.’ Poetry 208.2 (2016): 169–194. Stavanger, David, and Anne-Marie Te Whiu, ed. Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2019. Wilkinson, Jessica, and Ali Alizadeh. ‘The Realpoetik Manifesto.’ Cordite Poetry Review 14 Nov. 2012. . Wright, Judith. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford UP, 1965.

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35 LIFE WRITING AND CONFLICT Love Wins Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas

Love is a fierce tool with which we must fight; we must use it as a weapon to battle hatred actively. (Royalle 257; original emphasis) Conflict is often reflexively understood in the military sense: interpreted as armed engagement, the deployment of troops and weapons, as invasion, occupation, defence. Yet conflict is an unavoidable reality of relational social life. It is political, cultural, and personal. This chapter conceptually explores Australian literature and conflict but turns not to the ‘literal’ battlefield, though we are informed by ideas of conflict that are embodied in the experience of martial aggression, but to sites of aggression and conflict experienced and felt in the field of everyday life. This discussion is also not limited to ‘literal’ textual media. Hannah Gadsby’s global hit stand-up comedy performance Nanette, published as a Netflix special in 2017; the 2018 anthology Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, a monograph collection of creative and critical responses by LGTBQISA+ writers to the Australian marriage equality survey; and Magda Szubanski’s year-long cross-platform and performative deployment of her personal autobiographical story are contemporary responses to urgent social justice issues that narrate and testify to experiences of ideologically based and personally experienced conflict. These texts are mediated by form and characterised and linked by attempts to address a range of complex political domains such as gender equality, homophobia, sexual violence, and discrimination and they are examples of Australian life narrative – in recent years, critics have become more and more attentive to the ways in which auto/biographical forms are engaged in order to speak on behalf of marginalised subjects or in relation to activist causes, advancing recognition for these experiences within Australian cultural and social life. Acts of self-representation are diverse in form and genre and are not usually understood as ‘literary’ in a conventional sense, though they are also clearly aesthetic and symbolic and affective. These recent publications and performances of self and experience exist within an increasingly diverse spectrum of contemporary Australian literature and they offer a particular insight and constitute a distinctive mechanism by which individuals resist, reconcile, and articulate experiences of conflict in their everyday life. Literary and cultural representations of conflict are diverse in scale and scope, so what is specific about life narrative in relation to this topic? Although this chapter is not about military ‘conflict,’ a reflection on military writing proves helpful. In military history, documentation by and about ‘ordinary’ soldiers is understood to have a value unique and in contrast to those records left by more privileged participants; an emphasis too is placed on autobiographical and biographical material. For example, Australia’s most famous war correspondent, C.E.W. Bean, deliberately 344

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highlighted ‘ordinary’ military experience in his eyewitness accounts of the First World War. The historian Robin Gerster, in an essay on ‘Rereading Bean’ for Meanjin, argues that Bean’s unique approach probably stemmed as much from ‘a scepticism about the value of the despatches of generals and statesmen, and from a cynicism about the concept of the omniscient military genius’ as it did from his sense for the shape of a heroic narrative as one that focused on ‘the travails of the men at the cutting edge of battle, and not on the machinations of politicians, or the generals who directed things from behind the lines.’ Bean’s approach, nonetheless, was not necessarily anti-establishment. His heroic characterisation of the Australian soldier served to reinforce and perpetuate a national mythology: ‘Bean’s narrative impulse is directed towards revealing how ordinary men can exceed themselves when faced with war’s immense challenges, becoming larger than life’ (Gerster). Bean’s emphasis on the lives of soldiers over the lives of Generals is made significant through his attention to incorporating and documenting the everyday, lived experiences of his subjects, bringing to light perspectives and points of view not always visible in other kinds of documentary or storytelling about these events. Accounts of conflict produced by those ‘on the frontline’ or ‘from the field’ are distinctively persuasive or powerful. So too, a suspicion about the ‘official’ narrative and an emphasis on the remarkable individual are part of the legacy of military auto/ biographical writing in Australia but it also characterises discussion and representation of conflict more generally. Life narrative driven by the exploration and documentation of conflict – martial, general, or personal – also shows the pressure or pull of a public seemingly less and less persuaded by authoritative public histories or official accounts and who instead seek alternative eyewitness, or I witness, accounts. In this chapter, we take the Australian postal survey and subsequent Marriage Equality Bill as a pivot for exploring three life narrative texts that differently mediate and narrate experiences of conflict incited by this event and that document and deploy some of the individual responses lived and shared in relation to it.

Skin in the Game It takes a lot of energy to sustain skin in the game. (Eades and Vivienne v) Between 2 September and 7 November 2017, a non-binding, voluntary postal survey of attitudes to legalising marriage equality was distributed to all Australians then currently on the electoral roll. Almost 80% of Australians subsequently ‘expressed a view on the question “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?” and a majority indicated a positive response’ (McKeown). On 9 December 2017, the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act was passed to legalise marriage between two people of marriageable age, without reference to gender. In the lead-up to the survey, heavily visible campaigning and activism in relation to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ votes occurred around the country. As we explore later, on social media and in public performance, celebrities like Szubanski and Gadsby offered personal testimony in relation to the ‘yes’ campaign, citing a desire to be visible in this and as a support to others. Gadsby explained that her then-still-new (and pre-massive global success) stand-up comedy performance Nanette (2017) was in part a response to her personal sense of the devastating impact a ‘no’ vote would have and to what she saw as ongoing damage caused by campaigning in the lead-up to the survey (Sales). Szubanski had long been explicit in her desire to ‘supercharge the case for marriage equality’ and had been actively deploying her celebrity to this cause for a number of years (Lallo). Published in November 2018, on the first anniversary of the Marriage Amendment Act, Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ is an anthology of nonfiction, poetry, and visual images collected by editors Quinn Eades and Son Vivienne drawing from a mass of material produced during and 345

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after the postal survey. In their introduction to the volume, Eades and Vivienne explain that the collection is a determined act of ‘everyday activism,’ a concept developed from Vivienne’s academic work: ‘everyday activism is sharing private stories in public space in the hopes of catalysing change’ (v). It is a mode of storytelling that has ‘an intrinsic digital component, because whether we love social media or not, our lives are steeped in it’ (v). Drawing parallels to the ‘personal is political’ mantra of 1970s second-wave feminism, the anthology comprises material that ‘echoed and bounced across laptop and mobile screens and in conversations that were amplified by social media reposts’ (v). Published as a book, Going Postal collects and anthologises this dispersed digital content, leaving a lasting material trace and creating an organised record of the multiple, contradictory, and intimate personal acts of activism and testimony that emerged during the time. As such, the anthology is a record not so much of the legislative and political challenge (though it is this too) but a document of individual experience during an ideological conflict staged in relation to marriage, home, and love – here are the words, feelings, poems, and pictures of individuals experiencing crisis; their points of view are diverse, contradictory, and they employ varying degrees of emotiveness or feeling. Going Postal opens with one of a series of diary essay by Eades, one of a series of six published over a period of four months in literary journal The Lifted Brow and threaded throughout the Going Postal anthology. In ‘I Can’t Stop Crying,’ Eades documents the experience living through the postal survey, its preceding campaign, and the ongoing aftermath. ‘I’d been thinking a lot,’ says Eades, ‘about who mobilises and for what’ (1). Eades draws into view parallel and corollary ‘campaigns’ that have also been, more or less obliquely, about bodies and rights. In the opening to this first essay, Eades is writing ‘to make sense of the complexities of fighting for social justice,’ musing on the ‘rallies for Ms Dhu – who died in police custody in 2015’ and of which there are no attendance ‘estimates because they’re not deemed big enough’ (1). One hundred thousand people registering to vote might be ‘100,000 people saying yes’ but it might not be. Eades uses an intimate, monologic register to dissect and expose the conversations, internal and dialogic, that the events of the postal survey bring into reality, and in relation to Eades’s own domestic and intimate sphere. ‘This series gets harder to write as the weeks tread past me,’ writes Eades in the penultimate essay (‘I Can’t Stop Crying … My Gender is Not a Bomb’ 195). The essays keep count of the passing of time, of the piling up of small insults, routine humiliations, destroyed ‘yes’ posters, washing folded, birthday cakes baked, days lived or survived. In a postal survey, in a vote, numbers are important, yet they are also abstract and vague, dehumanising. In the final essay, Eades returns again to numbers, but these numbers are manifest and embodied, ‘bloodied’: the number of times trans people are at risk across their lifetimes from suicide, self-harm, or depression; the number of times Eades has been of this number (‘I Can’t Stop Crying … After Yes’ 210). The essays in the volume are arranged to offer alternative, productively diverse and sometimes contradictory points of view: Jess Ison is ‘a queer person vehemently opposed to gay marriage’ (82); Simon Copland wonders if an expectation of harm attributed to the postal survey is a self-fulfilling or defeatist prophecy, a ‘message of weakness’ that undermines the positive resistance the queer community has always had to practice and he uses his own experience of this as an example (125). Candy Royalle observes that ‘while people were bickering about the rights of two consenting adults to tie the knot, refugees on Manus were self-harming, being tortured’ (253). Most of the pieces in Going Postal are autobiographical, but Chloe Sargeant’s essay, ‘Australian Same-Sex Couples Wanting to Get Married Tell Their Stories,’ is a collection of seven short biographies of same-sex couples. Sargeant’s intention, as she explains in a brief introduction, is to combat a trend towards abstraction that reduced debate ‘down to a political tennis match’ and obscured the ‘real Australians who were directly affected by the debate’ (164). In their conclusion to Going Postal, Eades and Vivienne emphasise precisely this complexity and diversity as the potential of the collection, a way to ‘recognise the power of our voices, with 346

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all their distinct intonations and lived experiences, to effect change’ (265). Corollary anthologies take up this mandate: in the introduction to an issue of Griffith Review, Ashley Hay muses on the power and necessity of symbols at times of civil action and protest but also that such phenomena can prove reductive or limiting. A call for submissions thus emphasised ‘appetites for equality’ and ‘the primacy of love’ (Hay 8). It is the ‘individual stories’ that often disappear ‘beneath the broad political sweep of the campaigning around the postal vote,’ yet ‘these are windows into individual lives, with all their complexities and choices’ (9). Anthologies like the ones discussed here present and deploy life stories in order to enact change, to break silence, to heal personal or collective trauma, and to demand legal recognition and redress; to claim political attention and to catalyse processes of reparation. Crucial to this affect is that these stories emanate from lived experience; their significance is precisely in the representation of lived diversity, a productive complexity in the representation of shared experience, piercing the monolithic identity constructions that oppressive ideology and conflict, that hate thrives on and so not only love, but messy, subjective personal experience, wins.

‘Stories Hold Our Cure’: Nanette Comedian and social commentator Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette debuted in 2017 and was performed at venues around Australia (including the Adelaide Fringe Festival and the Sydney Opera House where Nanette was filmed), and also in Edinburgh and New York. As a stage show, and as a Netflix production (2018), Nanette received significant critical acclaim, winning multiple awards and wide critical praise (‘Banksa Overall Fringe Award Winners’; ‘Edinburgh Fringe Festival’; Da Costa; Francis; Zinoman). In Nanette, Gadsby crosses multiple auto/biographical genres (stand-up comedy, trauma narrative, confession, social commentary) with great confidence and to potent effect, making this performance one of the most important Australian life narratives of recent times. No longer a subordinate or exclusively popular form of entertainment, stand-up comedy is commonly political, and, as a genre, traverses low-, middle-, and high-brow cultures (Arthurs; Little). Understanding Gadsby’s performance as life narrative involves reflecting on how comedic life narrative works (Cardell and Kuttainen; Evans; Taylor), and, more specifically, the ways in which stand-up comedy might be considered a significant form of life narrative practice (Arthurs and Little; Chirico). For instance, like other life narrative genres, stand-up relies heavily on the established relationship between performer and audience (Arthurs and Little 36). As Jane Arthurs and Ben Little note, ‘audiences enjoy a sense of intimacy with the stand-up performer enabled by their proximity and appreciate the riskiness of the comedian’s interaction with them in a live event’ (36). Nanette explicitly represents conflict and trauma. Notably, Gadsby offers life narrative as a method for addressing conflict and trauma – in the forms of prejudice, aggression, and violence – and for finding a better way forward. Gadsby was born and raised in Tasmania. In Nanette, after offering a perhaps predictable sequence of jokes at the expense of Tasmania and its locals, Gadsby reminds us that homosexuality was a crime in Tasmania until 1997. Interspersing her trauma narrative with these kinds of documented detail in Nanette, Gadsby builds what she describes as an essential part of any comedic routine: ‘tension.’ We do not immediately know ‘the full story’ for any of the life narrative stories she discloses. Their significance only becomes apparent as we continue to watch. (Towards the end of Nanette, Gadsby explains that the problem with comedy is that it only has a beginning and a middle, whereas stories have a beginning, middle, and end; in the development of this section of Nanette, Gadsby demonstrates this point.) So, Gadsby explains the traumatic effect that the state’s homophobic laws had on her. She spent her entire adolescence living and growing into adulthood within this traumatic context. The legislation was often debated: the rights of LGBTQ people were constantly in the news and a 347

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common feature of talk-back news and letters to the editor (as Gadsby reminds us, ‘her people’ got a lot of bad press). The hostility towards the LGBTQ community was overt across diverse social spaces. Gadsby also relates a traumatic incident that happened when she was younger. Discussing what it is like to sometimes be mistaken for a man, Gadsby recounts ‘the time this young man had almost beaten me up because he thought I was cracking on to his girlfriend.’ Later, Gadsby revisits the joke, revealing that she had stopped at the middle of the story. She did not give it an end – because this is not the aim of comedy. But that was not the end of the story: ‘He beat the shit out of me – nobody stopped him.’ With rising emotion, Gadsby explains this was not the only time she had been violently abused by a man. As she explains why she believes she needs to quit comedy, Gadsby exclaims powerfully, ‘I will not put myself down to seek permission to speak.’ For Gadsby, jokes do not do enough when it comes to representing lives and addressing difficult subject matter. She explains, ‘[p]unchlines need trauma because punchlines need tension and tension feeds trauma.’ For Gadsby, comedy too often victimises vulnerable people for laughs; comedians have long played into this through the use of self-deprecating humour. But Gadsby shows how this is dangerous because it perpetuates the inequalities too often suffered by minority groups. Is what she wants to do – eschew conflict and tension in her delivery – incompatible with comedy? In its denouement, Nanette explores a way forward for comedy. The manifesto and method Gadsby offers is remarkably, in the end, as simple as it is powerful. As Gadsby explores the conflicts that have affected her (whether external conflict, for instance, discrimination and violent crime, or internal conflict, such as her admitted internalised homophobia), it is her ‘stories’ – her own personal stories, and the life narratives she has chosen to share with her publics – that have provided a way through the conflict. Gadsby posits that [w]e have our stories; these stories are our power because our stories have value. When someone tries to control our stories, this is when conflict occurs. But when people are allowed to hold and control their own narratives, a shared humanity is possible. Gadsby explains, ‘I don’t have a right to spread anger … I don’t want my story to be defined by anger,’ but further explains that ‘I don’t want to unite you with laughter or anger’ (original emphasis). Gadsby’s argument here is that it is stories that can be positioned as a ‘cure’ to conflict – to prejudice and misunderstanding. It is perhaps predictable that we, as life narrative scholars, are going to interpret Gadsby’s revelation in a particular way. It is a statement of the power and potential of life narrative. When people (such as Gadsby) are able to value their stories, their ‘truths,’ and feel empowered to share them, the result is a better understanding of human experience and the acceptance of diversity. Nanette was intended by Gadsby as her farewell to comedy. But the success of Nanette compelled Gadsby to continue, especially as she recognised that she could use her comedy platform to tell stories and to challenge the discourses of comedy in powerful ways. Gadsby returned in 2019 with a new show: Douglas. Douglas culminates with Gadsby’s disclosure that she has been diagnosed with autism and that this diagnosis has led her to a series of evaluations about her personal history alongside broader cultural histories and relationships. As Jamila Rizvi notes, There’s vulnerability in Gadsby’s decision to bring this large audience into her confidence, and that vulnerability builds further trust between the two. As a viewer, you are both deliciously uncomfortable and yet entirely at ease in her comedic, politically charged hands … Hannah Gadsby is a performer who knows her craft and grown comfortable in her newfound power. She isn’t afraid of wielding her global platform for the better.

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In both of her shows, Gadsby is explicitly anti-conflict, as conflict exists in a physical and emotional sense. She exposes instances where she has been affected by the physical and emotional abuse of others. Her comedy is about exposing perpetrators of violence and those who have kept minorities in unequal positions. Gadsby’s assertions are always intelligent, stemming from her wide knowledge which ranges from art history through to popular culture. Rizvi observes, ‘[w] hat seem like throwaway comments or quips, return again, before being made-over once more in more potent comedic form.’ As she seeks to redress cultural misconceptions, bias in language, and unchecked privilege, Gadsby practises the philosophy she espoused in Nanette: that when we own our stories they can be deployed in confronting and potent ways, with a view to genuine cultural change.

‘Today I Woke Up as an Equal Citizen’1: Magda Szubanski Magda Szubanski, AO is one of Australian’s best-loved celebrities. She is a popular Australian comedian: a household name whose comedy has traversed various award-winning television programmes such as Full Frontal (1993–1997) and Kath and Kim (2002–2007). She has twice been voted Australian’s most trusted celebrity (‘Magda Has “It”’). She has an Order of Australia medal for her services to Australian entertainment and, more recently, her social justice work. When Szubanski ‘came out’ on the television news programme The Project in 2012, it did not affect Magda’s brand. She continued to perform her comedy and win significant film and television roles. Her debut book, a memoir titled The Reckoning (2015), was a critically acclaimed bestseller. As an entertainer, a life narrator, and as a public intellectual who works across different media, Szubanski’s opinion has come to matter quite a lot to Australians. So, when Szubanski leant her gravitas to the ‘Vote Yes’ campaign, a great deal of optimism followed. This optimism was well placed. On 15 October 2017, the results of the postal survey were announced and Australia had voted ‘yes.’ Various commentators have pointed to Szubanski’s ‘crucial’ role in the ‘yes’ victory in the marriage equality vote (Greenwich; Lallo). Szubanski’s was a multimedia strategy: appearances on television news programmes such as A Current Affair, The Project, and Q&A, as well as a strong Twitter presence. But the grounding feature of Szubanski’s method was that it was never couched in conflict: like Gadsby, Szubanski would use her own stories in her political methods, as pleas to recognise our shared humanity in the face of any perceived differences. Szubanski knew what she was capable of, what she could use her platform for. She did so with significant success and, like Gadsby, revealed the power of non-violent political intervention. When Szubanski appeared on the popular Australian political-panel programme Q&A in October 2017, Australians were reaching the end of the marriage equality postal survey period. There was still time for debate and the assembled panel included representative from the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns – church leaders and politicians. And then there was Magda. When Szubanski appears publicly, on programmes like Q&A, it is not a fair intellectual fight. She is articulate and witty; she has weapons that others do not. But she also knows how to use them – with kindness, with humility, and with humanity. On the panel, Szubanski spoke with good humour, confidence, and acumen. She was well-prepared and offered succinct and persuasive rebuttals to arguments made by panellists and audience members, for instance, on the idea that civil unions might offer a version of marriage equality (the hilariously smart analogy she draws between civil unions and the AFL Brownlow Medal is not to be missed). Szubanski never spoke out of turn; there were even instances where she acknowledged that she had had her say and it was time for someone else to speak (a rare occurrence on Q&A!). Such is her understanding of how discourse works, and such is her confidence in her own narrative to do its job within the method she has chosen. As Neil McMahon notes:

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There she was again on Monday, dealing with the slings and arrows – the slights against her and the sleights of hand by those on the other side – with grace and calm. She marshalled facts with feeling, letting nothing slide and laying everything out, including the personal experience that drives her but which she never allows to emerge as fury. The day after her appearance on Q&A, clips of her impassioned speeches went viral across social media. When Szubanski appeared on The Project on 25 October 2017, she discussed (not for the first time) why she would never use the term ‘homophobe’ to describe someone who was voting ‘no,’ as she powerfully acknowledged that she has friends who would vote that way. Szubanski is not in the business of personal attacks. During this appearance, as on Q&A, she again appealed to logical arguments centring on the law and human rights. She cited statistics and shared historical knowledge about laws, the church, and so forth, always bringing her arguments back to her own experience and right to speak. Authority was crucial to Szubanski’s testimony. As Gillian Whitlock argues, in Australia during this period, cultural appropriation and the right to speak on and represent certain subjects was a particularly potent issue (536). These debates were a reminder of ‘the powerful presence of life stories in contemporary writing’ (536–537). Szubanski’s public persona during this time reflected her sense that with power comes great responsibility. In an appearance on A Current Affair, Szubanski is shown talking to a man on the street. He tells her he wanted to stay impartial in the debate but felt like there was ‘bullying from the “yes” campaign.’ But he wanted to know more from the ‘famous actress’ he was talking to. As Szubanski respectfully engaged with this man, there was a sense that there was potential for him to change his mind. Szubanski’s Twitter feed for the period of the same-sex-marriage survey, through to the passing of the Marriage Equality Bill in parliament, offers further evidence of her reach. During this time, Szubanski interacted with and mobilised support from people across the community, including politicians from different parties, religious groups such as Australian Christians for Marriage Equality, and celebrities such as actor Sam Neill and comedian Dawn French. During this time, Szubanski was prolific on Twitter, and so, with this, came some vicious abuse from trolls. She also faced accusations of ‘bullying’ from the ‘yes’ campaign which she again rebutted with appeals to evidence and facts: It’s (mildly) interesting to me that every single time a far-right troll accuses me of abusing Christians or no voters and I ask them for instances they never reply. Coz they know no instance exists. They just throw the mud in the hope it will stick. (Twitter, 18 Nov. 2017) But Szubanski also received some genuine criticism and challenges from ‘no’ voters. Szubanski often retweeted these messages, offering respectful explanations as response. These replies often begin with ‘Darl.’ It became very clear that, like Gadsby, Szubanski too did not want her story to be defined by anger. A very different method was required to prove that love wins. The American essayist Leslie Jamison observes that one of the most crucial (and recurring) questions for autobiographical writing is often framed in terms of its significance as storytelling both of and beyond the personal: ‘how can the confession of personal experience create something that resonates beyond itself?’ For subjects engaged in acts of life narration from contexts of conflict or adversity, the disclosure of personal detail becomes part of ammunition and resistance in relation to a specific cause; there is always a risk that such disclosure, to continue the military metaphor, will also entail ‘collateral damage.’ However, when a conflict is waged in relation to individuals as they live and experience and within what is overwhelmingly a domestic, private context – in relation to legal rights and consenting romantic relationships – the personal is already and irrevocably drawn into view. 350

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The testimony collected by Eades and Vivienne in Going Postal is a public, literary protest in the face of a conflict on private life. It draws on individual experiences and perspective from within a related yet diverse (and sometimes divided) community and mobilises and deploys this as a body of autobiographical stories. The life narratives shared in Going Postal are vulnerable, diverse, contradictory, and intensely personal; they present a collective view inconsistent with monolithic views on ‘queer’ identity and that deliberately refuses a deindividualised perspective on the significance of marriage to queer lives. Similarly, celebrity activists like Szubanski or Gadsby take up discursively confessional standpoints within otherwise conservative or well-established genres (comedy and the talkshow) in order to both interrupt dominant narrative about ‘queer lives’ and rewrite the kinds of scripts and positions available to individuals surviving their own personal conflicts. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith have argued that within human rights contexts, it is life narratives in particular that harness the authority and persuasiveness of personal, subjective experience. This is both a structural and affective phenomenon: ‘stories enlisted within and attached to human rights frameworks are particular kinds of stories – strong, emotive stories often chronicling degradation, brutalization, exploitation, and physical violence; stories that testify to the denial of subjectivity and loss of group identities’ (4). This chapter has looked at three case studies of life narrative storytelling that emerged from both ‘everyday’ and celebrity figures in relation to this conflict in order to explore the kinds of autobiographical works that emerged during the postal survey, a period of cultural and social conflict over identity and rights that was also a war for a ‘way of life.’ Personal narration and autobiographical storytelling was a key mode of response and activism during the marriage equality survey and associated debates and has functioned in the aftermath as memory and testimony to the ongoing consequences of a divisive social conflict.

Note 1 Magda Szubanski. Twitter 20 Dec. 2017.

Works Cited Arthurs, Jane, and Ben Little. ‘Stand-Up Comedy.’ Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics. Ed. Jane Arthurs and Ben Little. London: Palgrave Pivot, 2016. 27–54 ‘BankSA Overall Fringe Award Winners – Best Comedy.’ Adelaide Fringe 19 Mar. 2017. . Cardell, Kylie, and Victoria Kuttainen. ‘The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir.’ Mosaic 45.3 (2012): 99–114. Chirico, Miriam. ‘Performed Authenticity: Narrating the Self in the Comic Monologues of David Sedaris, John Leguizamo, and Spalding Gray.’ Studies in American Humour 2.1 (2016): 22–46 Copland, Simon. ‘How We Failed Our Bit of a Bent Community.’ Eades and Vivienne, Going Postal. 121–125. Douglas, Kate. ‘YouTube Apologies and Reality TV Revelations – the Rise of the Public Confession.’ Conversation 24 May 2019. . Da Costa, Cassie. ‘The Funny, Furious Anti-Comedy of Hannah Gadsby.’ New Yorker 2 May 2018. . Eades, Quinn. ‘I Can’t Stop Crying.’ Eades and Vivienne, Going Postal. 1–5. ———. ‘I Can’t Stop Crying … After Yes.’ Eades and Vivienne, Going Postal. 208–213. ———. ‘I Can’t Stop Crying … My Gender is Not A Bomb.’ Eades and Vivienne, Going Postal. 195–199. Eades, Quinn, and Son Vivienne. ‘Introduction: Everyday Activism – Writing, Drawing, and Dreaming from Between the Cracks.’ Eades and Vivienne, Going Postal. iv–viii. ———, ed. Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Melbourne, VIC: Brow, 2018. Gadsby, Hannah. Nanette. Dir. Jon Olb and Madeleine Parry. Netflix, 2018.

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Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas ———. Douglas. Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide. 23 Mar. 2019. ‘Edinburgh Fringe Festival: Hannah Gadsby Named Joint Winner of Comedy Award.’ ABC News 27 Aug. 2017. . Evans, Anne-Marie. ‘Funny Women: Political Transgressions and Celebrity Autobiography.’ Transgressive Humour of American Women Writers. Ed. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 155–174. Francis, Hannah. ‘Hannah Gadsby Wins Barry Award at 2017 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.’ Sydney Morning Herald 23 Apr. 2017. . Gerster, Robin. ‘On Rereading Bean’s Official History.’ Meanjin (2017). . Greenwich, Alex. ‘Magda Szubanski was the Wonder Woman of the Yes Campaign.’ Star Observer 14 Nov. 2018. . Hay, Ashley. ‘All Being Equal – The Novella Project VI.’ Griffith Review 62 (2018). . Ison, Jess. ‘Queers Against Gay Marriage: What to Do in this Postal Vote?’ Eades and Vivienne, Going Postal. 82–86. Jamison, Leslie. ‘The Possibilities of the Personal.’ Nieman Storyboard 21 Oct. 2015. . Lallo, Michael. ‘Marriage Equality: Magda Szubanski’s Crucial Role in Yes Victory.’ Sydney Morning Herald 15 Nov. 2017 (first published 15 Nov. 2014). . ‘Magda Has “It.”’ Age 31 May 2004. . ‘Magda’s Plea.’ A Current Affair. Nine Network. 18 Sept. 2017. McKeown, Deidre. ‘Chronology of Same-Sex Marriage Bills Introduced into the Federal Parliament: A Quick Guide.’ Parliamentary Library. 24 Nov. 2017. . McMahon, Neil. ‘Q&A Recap: Magda Szubanski Delivers Emotional Punch in Same-Sex Marriage Debate.’ Sydney Morning Herald 24 Oct. 2017. . Q&A. ABC. 23 Oct. 2017. Rizvi, Jamila. ‘Hannah Gadsby’s Vulnerability is Her Most Powerful Asset.’ Future Women. Nd. . Royalle, Candy. ‘The Battle is Far from Over.’ Eades and Vivienne, Going Postal. 253–258. Sales, Leigh. ‘Hannah Gadsby: Leigh Sales was Nervous about Interviewing the Comedian. But it was “Fantastic.”’ ABC News 15 Sept. 2017. . Sargeant, Chloe. ‘Australian Same-Sex Couples Wanting to Get Married and Tell Their Stories.’ Eades and Vivienne, Going Postal. 164–173. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Taylor, Anthea. Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. The Project. Ten Network. 25 Oct. 2017. Whitlock, Gillian. ‘Keloid Geography.’ Biography 39.4 (2017): 531–537. Zinoman, Jason. ‘Introducing a Major New Voice in Comedy (Who Also Attacks Comedy).’ New York Times 19 Mar. 2018. .

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36 RELUCTANT WANDERING New Mobilities in Contemporary Australian Travel Writing Kate Cantrell In 1952, while Janet Frame was a patient at Seacliff Asylum, New Zealand’s Caxton Press published her first book: a collection of short stories titled The Lagoon and Other Stories. Frame, who was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia some years earlier, was scheduled for a frontal lobotomy when it was announced – three days prior to the operation – that her debut collection had won the Hubert Church Memorial award, at the time the country’s most prestigious literary prize (King 112). Subsequently, Frame’s lobotomy was cancelled and she was discharged from the hospital ‘on probation’ (Frame, ‘Autobiography’ 223). Geoffrey Blake-Palmer, the hospital superintendent tasked with overseeing Frame’s procedure, reportedly told her, ‘I’ve decided that you should stay as you are’ (222). Three decades later, with the advantage of hindsight, Frame wrote in her autobiography, ‘It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life’ (221). When Frame was finally released from Seacliff, she resolved that she would ‘postpone [her] future no longer’ (226), and in July 1956, she sailed out of Wellington Harbour on a ship bound for London, a city she would later describe as a ‘Kaf ka dream’ bursting with ‘buses like bright red sandwiches … and masked men with briefcases, yeast-bun hats, and Freudian-sinister umbrellas’ (King 147). Interestingly, in her semi-autobiographical novella, Towards Another Summer (2007), Frame figures her protagonist, Grace Cleave, not as a monstrous vermin but as a migratory bird. ‘Why a migratory bird?’ Grace wonders. ‘No doubt because I’ve journeyed from the other side of the world’ (9). Like Frame, Grace is a homesick author living in London and working on a difficult novel. Despite her longing to fly home, she is adamant that she must not return to her native land: ‘I was a certified lunatic in New Zealand,’ she says. ‘Go back? I was advised to sell hats for my salvation’ (15). Of course, Grace’s insistence that she does not miss home is undermined by her sense of displacement – what Frame calls a ‘roots crisis’ – and her unwelcome memories of New Zealand (King 243). ‘I must not remember,’ Grace reminds herself. ‘I live in London. The Southern Cross cuts through my heart instead of through the sky, and I can’t see it or walk beneath it, and I don’t care, I don’t care’ (Frame 10). In the end, Grace’s refusal to return is thwarted by her internal transformation, which she cannot escape or control. In London, she is hospitalised regularly for depression; she is convinced her arms are growing feathers; and she believes that her body, feathered or not, is incapable of adapting to the dreary English weather. Even her hair, which was once flame-red, is now a sooty grey. Instead of looking forward to the future, this internal exile with ‘Antipodean deposit in her bones’ is preparing to fly towards another summer (3). In other words, she is preparing for the long migration home.

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Historical Baggage: Australian Travel Writing from Federation to the Present Travel has always been an important trope of settler literature, central not only to colonial displacement and dispossession but to postcolonial reimaginings of identity, gender, and place. However, it was not until the early twentieth century, after the rise of literary nationalism, that a more nativist form of travel writing emerged in Australia. In the first decade of the 1900s, travel narratives were essentially naturalist assemblages of specific regions that purposefully resisted an earlier urge to romanticise the land or reduce it to either a volatile antagonist or a haphazardous backdrop. Ted Banfield’s Confessions of a Beachcomber (1908) is a frank account of the author’s attempt to ‘set down in plain language the sobriety of everyday occurrences’ on Dunk Island, his remote Queensland home on the Barrier Reef (4). His contemporary, Charles Barrett, also published several travel books, including The Bush Ramblers (1907), a short, illustrated story about a young Australian family who leave their home in the ‘great city’ of Melbourne to live in the ‘big, lonely bush’ (5–6). The book, which was initially published domestically – a rare occurrence for the time – helped popularise the outback for young Australians. Like Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894), the work was extolled for its portrayal of ‘authentic’ Australian children rather than transplanted British ones. Jeannie Gunn, who also wrote for children, is better known for her autobiographical novel, We of the Never-Never (1908), a recount of her brief stint as the station manager’s wife at the old Elsey Homestead on Rope River. These works, though principally concerned with Western notions of travel, signalled a rejection of Antipodean inversion and the crude tendency to view Australia as a place that was upside-down and inside-out, a topsy-turvy land that was either ‘absurdly comic or downright dangerous’ (White and Greenwood 406). For the first time, in the immediate aftermath of Federation, travel writing penned by Australians, about Australia, gained a significant readership. By mid-century, there was an established tradition of Australian travel writing, thanks in part to the introduction of motor touring in the 1930s and a post-war boom in mass migration and tourism. Frank Clune and Colin Simpson were the most prolific Australian travel writers of the post-war period, averaging one book per year during their decades-long careers. Clune’s most popular travel book, Roaming Round New Zealand (1956), is a colourful account of his three-month road trip around the island, a narrative of ‘one of the happiest holidays of [his] wandering life’ (x). With characteristic modesty that borders on self-parody, Clune strategically targets the popular mass market by consciously adopting the persona of the ‘everyday’ tourist rather than the highbrow traveller. For Simpson too, this carefully constructed authorial identity exploited the natural corollary between his unassuming persona as an ‘average’ tourist and his outsider status as a ‘regular’ Australian whose humility and self-depreciation were residual effects of colonial mentality. As Richard White suggests, ‘being a tourist was simply being Australian: ordinary, egalitarian, unpretentious’ (194). Certainly, Clune rejected anti-tourist snobbery, insisting in Roaming Round Europe (1954) that his ‘random rambles’ (22) were sincere observations intended for ‘average readers’ and ‘compatriots of like mind’ (9). Similarly, Simpson regarded himself as a ‘professional’ tourist, a vocation that he deemed ‘a perfectly respectable word’ and ‘a civilised thing to be’ (6). For a brief moment, this increasingly democratic view of travel collapsed the traveller/tourist dichotomy: a trend that would not manifest itself so markedly again until the twenty-first century. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s, Australian travel writing was chiefly preoccupied with road stories, and with narratives of risk and adventure. Many of these works privileged colonial heroics; however, there were some exceptions, although even these progressive texts were still, to an extent, underpinned by imperialist attitudes and values. Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980), the account of her solitary journey by camel across the Australian desert, highlighted the severity of racial tensions between white and Indigenous Australians, while simultaneously engaging with 354

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issues of Aboriginal sovereignty. While Tracks has been praised for its anti-colonial sentiments and progressive politics, as well as its open critique of exploitative tourism, the work has been criticised recently for ill-using the exoticism of Indigenous culture (Clarke 48). In Davidson’s visit to the Areyonga mission, for example, she relays with matter-of-fact directness how ‘the blacks were rounded up like cattle’ and ‘half-caste children were taken forcibly from their mothers and kept separate, as they were seen as having at least a chance of becoming human’ (118). Here, as elsewhere, Davidson offers a sobering image of colonial violence before resorting problematically to a fatalistic acceptance of the once pervasive ‘doomed’ race theory: ‘The Aborigines do not have much time,’ she writes. ‘They are dying’ (119). Similarly, in Bruce Chatwin’s seminal travel book, The Songlines (1987), Chatwin confronts the intransigent legacies of Australia’s colonial past, while at the same time not only restoring the trope of ‘the dying race’ but also reducing and containing Indigeneity to a kind of spiritual primitivism ( Johnson 60). When Chatwin goes kangaroo hunting with Donkey-donk, a big-bellied Aboriginal man, he is disappointed to learn that Donkey-donk’s weapon of choice is not a spear but his old Ford Sedan. Clare Johnson explains how Chatwin’s disappointment reveals a misplaced nostalgia for, and an infatuation with, primitive innocence, which is situated in opposition to the achievements of modernity: an antithetical position which ensures that ‘black bodies can never inhabit a cultural future … instead, they must always represent some unattainable, unchangeable past’ (62). While both texts, then, are sympathetic to Indigenous concerns, their self-conscious melancholia, exposed in moments of rhetorical slippage, inadvertently reactivates colonial power, a criticism that is still levelled at Anglophone travel writing today. A decade later, in the 1990s, when the politics of reconciliation became a governing principle in Australian race relations, Indigenous writers such as Kim Scott and Sally Morgan presented more positive expressions of Aboriginality by imagining new possibilities for acceptance and healing through travel writing that sought to recover ancestral connections to language and land. The epigraph in Scott’s semi-autobiographical novel, True Country (1993), the story of a young school teacher who moves to the remote mission town of Karnama, evokes a vision of unity and resilience: We carry in our hearts the true country And that cannot be stolen We follow in the steps of our ancestry And that cannot be broken. (11)

A year later, Ruby Langford Ginibi’s My Bundjalung People (1994) detailed her travels back to the land where she was born, her ‘belongin’ place’ (xvii). The opening chapter, Yarmbellah (Goin’ Home), begins with an admission that captures the intersection of travel writing and autobiography in postcolonial texts: ‘I wanted to travel back to the country where I was born to find my roots … in our Koori way, we all want go back to where we came from’ (1). The novel, which Ruby’s daughter describes as ‘a journey of the mind and spirit,’ ends with an affirmation that seals the narrative as both a critique of settler colonialism and a performance of Aboriginal solidarity: We have been divided and quartered, and split apart, and torn asunder … [but] we are here! And always will be here!... Don’t be gobbingh-miggingh and take everything from us. You white people have to learn to give something back. Give back our mother earth. (212) At the same time as Indigenous writers were undertaking what Robert Clarke calls ‘Journeys to Country’ (118), a number of prominent international travel writers, such as Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, as well as Mark McCrum and Annie Caulfield, turned their gaze to Australia. For the most part, these visiting authors cast a critical eye towards the nation’s racial divisions and 355

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casual misogynism, and conjured ideas of the Land Down Under as something of a cultural joke. For Theroux, Australia was ‘an underdeveloped country’ of ‘people who had only recently been domesticated’ (43), while for McCrum, Australia was ‘a fantastically ill-considered cocktail of Castlemaine and Fosters ads, with stray bits of Crocodile Dundee, Dame Edna, Strictly Ballroom, and Neighbours thrown in’ (xv). In Journeys (1984), Jan Morris evokes a similar image of the country as a cultural and geographical anomaly banished to the edge of the world: The water goes down the plug-hole the other way in Australia, and it really is possible to imagine, if you are a fancifully-minded visitor from the other hemisphere, that this metropolis is clinging upside-down to the bottom of the earth, so subtly antipodean, or perhaps marsupial. (5) For Bryson, whose modus operandi is comedic self-irony, Australia is both familiar and strange, a place that is ‘at once recognisably similar but entirely different’ (209), a land that is ‘staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained’ (23). In Bryson’s best-selling travelogue, Down Under (2000), he subscribes to the idea of Australia as the lucky country – ‘a [place] of abundant sunshine and good jobs, good homes, good prospects’ (225). His work reinforces the mythical narrative that cultural difference in middle-class Australia is funny rather than threatening: ‘Apart from a tendency among Australian men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts,’ Bryson writes, ‘these people are just like you and me’ (25). In this way, Bryson joins a long tradition of visiting Anglophone travellers who represent Australia through a utopian lens. Even the disappearance of Harold Holt is depicted, with Bryson’s pen, not as a political drama or tragedy but as a bizarre comedy that endears the nation to him: On my first visit [to Australia], some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight from London reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the Prime Minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly astounding to me – first that Australia could just lose a Prime Minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me … The fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins Down Under – not entirely without reason, of course … This is a country that loses a prime minister. (15–19) Not surprisingly, the romantic gaze of Bryson and others, combined with colonial anxiety and insecurity, resulted in internalised Eurocentrism, which materialised as a casual self-dismissal of Australia’s peripheral vision. In other words, Australian travel writing, as both a genre and a field of study, returned to a preoccupation with the outsider’s perspective, which was regarded by Australians themselves as the only legitimate authority on the Antipodes. The widespread adoption of this position promoted stereotypical images of Australia as both ordinary and exotic, and failed to reconcile the utopian promise of Australia with the darker realities of its traumatic past. As a result, Australian travel writing in the 1990s was popularly conceived as travel writing about Australia rather than travel writing by Australians abroad. As Ros Pesman, David Walker, and Richard White point out, [w]hen we think of English travel writing, we think readily enough of what the English have written about the world. When we think of Australian travel writing, we are more likely to think of what the world has written about Australia. (x–xi)

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In fact, it was not until the mid-1990s that the first compendiums of overseas travel writings by Australians were compiled (a startling fact given that the first overseas trip by an Australian was recorded 200 years earlier, when two Indigenous men, Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie, accompanied Governor Phillip on his return voyage to London). The first of these collections, The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing, signalled an important shift in Australian travel writing studies; its publication in 1996, a year before the launch of Studies in Travel Writing (the first scholarly journal in the field), marked the start of a revisionist approach to Australian travel writing that privileged the experiences of the Australian middle class. As the editors of The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing explain: ‘Australian travel’ in library catalogues tends to bring together the works of visitors travelling in Australia … The immediate interest has been in what outsiders have said about us, not what we have said about them. This anthology breaks the habit in asserting that ‘Australian travel writing’ ought to be concerned with Australians’ perceptions of the rest of the world. (Pesman, Walker, and White xi) Today, Australian travel writing is a burgeoning subject of academic enquiry, and in Australia, as elsewhere, there is a broadening rather than narrowing perspective of what constitutes ‘travel’ writing. In the academy, it is rare that one will encounter a literature course that is wholly dedicated to the genre; however, any course on Australian literature is likely to include travel writing in one of its many guises. Christos Tsiolkas, for example, often employs lonely protagonists who, uprooted from home, wander the city streets in search of existential meaning and momentary pleasures. Dead Europe (2005), Tsiolkas’s third novel, is a hallucinatory reconstruction of the Grand Tour: ‘a debauched journey, punctuated by drugs, alcohol, and prostitutes … [that] slowly becomes the stuff of a Gothic nightmare’ (Gildersleeve 61). Similarly, Kristina Olsson’s novels are emotional cartographies: intimate explorations of life’s undulations, the push-pull of memory and place, and the cyclical nature of grief and loss. Olsson’s early novel, The China Garden (2009), is a multigenerational story about inherited trauma and the endless orbit it repeats; as the characters hurtle towards their future, the ghosts of the past ‘stretch their infinite limbs, and crack their lively knuckles, and wait’ (77). Olsson’s most recent novel, Shell (2018), is an extension of her thematic preoccupations. The novel adopts a complex non-linear structure to meld two intertwining tales: the construction of the Sydney Opera House, a building described poetically by a young glass artist as ‘a bowl, newly shattered’ (23), and the introduction of the deadly conscription lottery during the Vietnam War, a political commentary on the country ‘forcing young men to leave to fight wars which were not theirs’ (371). Olsson’s decision to set Shell in the 1960s, in the early years of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, is especially interesting, since war has always necessitated overseas travel for Australians, and since it has been suggested that even at war Australians were tourists (White 119; Pesman, Walker, and White xiii). As Richard White, speaking of Australian enlistment during the First World War, explains: A desire to see the world – not just a search for adventure – was probably a much more significant motive for enlistment than is often recognised. The Australians remained a volunteer force throughout the war and the enlistment rate was remarkable – probably half of the eligible single men joined up. They were soon called, mockingly or cheerfully, ‘six-boba-day-tourists,’ a term the troops themselves adopted, not always ironically. (‘The Soldier as Tourist’ 119–120)

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Certainly, one of the most brazen pieces of pro-war propaganda produced by the Australian Government of the time was a recruiting pamphlet that purported to sell young Australian men a ‘free tour to Great Britain and Europe … a personally conducted tour whereby you can see the world and save money at the same time’ (‘Free Tour’). The brochure begins: Every young Australian man has the desire at some time or another to see the world … Every young man has a chance today of treating himself to such a tour free of all cost, full of adventure and excitement, such as the most world-weary can revel in. The proliferation and popularity of travel writing, then, both as a site of scholarly interest and as a creative endeavour, reflects the multiplicity of ways that Australian travel writing continues to evolve. Of course, the remarkable endurance of the genre is partly due to its diverse and highly protean nature, incorporating, as it does, stories as varied as tales of migration, diaspora, and exile, and encompassing both historical and contemporary forms, including the travel memoir or diary, the guidebook, the investigative report, the personal or exploratory essay, and, since the rise of new media, the travel blog and #travelgram. Naturally, the expansion of the genre has also been guided by the ascent of postcolonial studies and the feminist recovery of travel stories that were commonly dismissed as ‘excursions’ rather than expeditions. More recently, an upsurgence of interest in mobility studies has raised new questions, not only about the experience of moving (and being moved) but about what constitutes movement itself (Adey 58). For mobility scholars, theorisations of mobility and immobility are intrinsic to the way travel is practised and prohibited; to where we go and why, to how we get there, and to whom or what we move for or against. As Anne-Marie Fortier asks, Who moves freely and who doesn’t? How does one’s place of residence on the planet frame one’s capacity to leave or travel, if one so desires? How does the movement of some rely on the immobility of others? Who can travel and who can stay at home? (66) While travel, then, remains central to the Australian experience, and while ‘travel’ is still the usual lens for reading and interpreting narratives of movement, ‘mobility,’ as both a theoretical tool and a methodological approach, is gaining conceptual and linguistic currency in the humanities. As a critical framework, mobility research challenges the ideological associations of travel with freedom and liberty, and recognises instead that, for many, marginality and instability are central to the experience of travel in the modern world.

Mobilities and Moorings: New Directions for Australian Travel Writing Mobility studies takes, as its primary concern, social and spatial relations and displacements, and has therefore been adopted by disciplines as diverse as anthropology, geography, cultural studies, migration studies, international relations, tourism studies, sociology, and the creative arts. While its scope of enquiry is ostensibly broad, mobility research is specifically concerned with the complex interrelationships between historical and contemporary ideologies, practices, infrastructures, objects, and technologies that enable or disable movement at both the local and global level (Sheller 790). Naturally, the field has developed around three key themes: mobility systems (that is, the mechanisms that permit physical movement at different scales and speeds, and which are therefore both informational and infrastructural), mobility capital (that is, the distribution of movement capacities and competencies, especially as they relate to social, cultural, and political affordances), and mobility justice (that is, issues of mobility rights and responsibilities, including the political dimensions of ‘uneven’ or ‘disrupted’ mobility or motility) (Sheller 790). Not surprisingly, mobility 358

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studies seeks to demonstrate how mobility – and the control and regulation of mobility – both reflects and reinforces the production of power, and how, in turn, these power dynamics or ‘power geometries’ are not only interconnected but also relative (Massey 62). In other words, mobility scholars recognise not only that mobility is configured differently for different social groups, in different national spaces, at different historical periods, but that the mobility of some peoples heightens the immobility of others (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 3). As Doreen Massey explains, ‘it is not simply a question of unequal distribution, that some people move more than others, some have more control than others. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken others’ (63). Beverley Skeggs agrees with Massey that ‘mobility is a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship’ (49), as does Caren Kaplan, who suggests that ‘all displacements are not the same’ (2). While there has been some debate recently as to whether this new mobility turn is, in fact, ‘new,’ or whether it is, more accurately, a return to the ‘old’ social sciences, which have always been concerned with movement of various kinds, there is general agreement among scholars that the mobility approach, in revisiting and bridging existing theories, epistemologies, and methodologies, offers a more holistic approach to mobility studies than disciplinary perspectives (Cresswell, ‘Politics’ 18; Sheller 803). As Tim Cresswell explains: … if nothing else, the ‘mobilities’ approach brings together a diverse array of forms of movement across scales ranging from the body (or, indeed, parts of the body) to the globe. These substantive areas of research would have been formerly held apart by disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries that mitigated against a more holistic understanding of mobilities. (‘Politics’ 18) Cresswell’s work is particularly interesting for the study of travel writing because it draws attention to the politics of mobility, and, in doing so, suggests that different forms of travel, like different conceptions of place, are always socially constructed and performed. For Cresswell, mobility is a ‘fragile entanglement’ of ‘movement, representation, and practice’ (19); these entanglements have traceable histories and geographies that form ‘constellations of mobility,’ which are ‘particular patterns of movement, representations of movement, and ways of practising movement that make sense together’ (18). In other words, mobility refers to physical movement and the way that movement is experienced and shared. Mobility, therefore, is always coded by the complex entanglement of both geographical and social movement, and the images, symbols, and metaphors attached to that movement by a society. For example, in Cresswell’s work on The Tramp in America (2001), he reveals how a rising number of ‘unwanted wanderers’ or ‘hobos’ in late nineteenth-century America led to widespread moral panic about perceived threats to ‘normal’ life, which resulted in a process of pathologising the tramp as a diseased and genetically defective body (9). Cresswell shows, for instance, how associations between the rise of social pauperism and the spread of syphilis drew correlations between the diseased body of the infected tramp and the metaphorical body of American democracy, since tramps were often accused of venal voting (129). As a result, the tramp not only became a symbol of political corruption but a threat to the ideological equation of mobility with democracy, one of the foundational myths on which America was built. Thus, the sociocultural associations of mobility with deviance often lead to a dangerous conflation of issues of mobility with issues of morality, since movement of any kind is the assumed threat to the stability and fixity of home. As Cresswell explains: Place, home, and roots are described as a fundamental human need … [they] are profoundly moral concepts in the humanist lexicon. By implication, mobility appears to involve a number 359

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of absences – the absence of commitment, attachment, and involvement – a lack of significance. The more widespread associations of mobility [are] with deviance, shiftlessness, and disrepute. (15–16) Cresswell’s work, which is heavily influenced by humanistic geography, is firmly grounded in the Western tradition of mobility studies, which, historically, has tended to concentrate on research from the Global North. However, a formative call to expose and avoid the privileging of North-centric understandings of mobility has led to broader representation of the diversity of mobility research being conducted in the Antipodes and beyond. Ingrid Horrocks, for example, a New Zealand writer and scholar, has approached her recent work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women travellers through a mobility lens, arguing that the term ‘mobility’ rather than ‘travel’ is useful because it provides a broader framework for approaching the indeterminacies of what she characterises as ‘wandering’ (Horrocks, ‘Wandering’). Horrocks’s recent book, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 (2017), is a rigorous study of a band of British travel writers who are ‘reluctant wanderers’: ‘forlorn, unhappy, helpless, harassed, and even terrified women … moving not because they choose to but because they have no other choice’ (1). Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney are reconfigured in Horrocks’s work as anguished wanderers whose experience of ‘deep homelessness’ is not only literal but also emotional and imaginative (2). For these women, wandering is not a form of romantic vagrancy or leisurely rambling but a type of obligatory meandering that issues from, and is exacerbated by, their marginal social positions; after all, these women are displaced paradoxically by their enclosure. They are, for example, impoverished writers dependent on the market; wives separated from difficult husbands; adolescent women whose guardians preyed upon rather than protected them; unmarried mothers; unhoused widows; and by the height of the French Revolution, also refugees in flight. (Horrocks, ‘Wandering’) Frances Burney, in The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814), captures this reality when she has her wandering protagonist, Juliet Granville, declare: ‘how little fitted to the female character, to female safety, and female propriety, was this hazardous … wandering’ (264–265). Like Cresswell, then, Horrocks reveals how mobilities are gendered, and how relentless movement may be involuntary rather than self-directed or self-imposed. As Burney’s Juliet reiterates, she has ‘no motive of choice’; as a wanderer, she follows ‘paths unknown to herself, with feet no more swift than trembling … yet not daring, by a glance around, to ascertain either danger or safety’ (243).

Shared Bearings: Reluctant Wandering in Contemporary Women’s Travel Writing At the turn of the nineteenth century, reluctant wandering manifested itself most clearly in the short fiction of Australian women writers such as Rosa Campbell Praed and Barbara Baynton. These works, while not travel stories per se, are unsettling tales of female im/mobility. Baynton’s short stories, in particular, situate the female wanderer in the nightmarish void between perpetual motion and debilitating stasis, both of which terminate in literal or figurative paralysis, and even death. In Baynton’s most harrowing story, ‘The Chosen Vessel’ (1896), a young mother alone in the bush with her infant child is lured from home by a predatory swagman who waits in the night with ‘outstretched arms’ and a ‘gleaming knife’ (294). As he slinks around the house, the young mother, who has for hours been immobilised by a crippling sense of dread, flees ‘madly’ into the dark with her child, ‘flying like the wind with the speed that deadly peril gives’ (294). As both the 360

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woman’s home space and the surrounding bushland are equally perilous, the terrain she occupies is always dangerous. Therefore, her flight from the ramshackle house – her final transgression – only delays her death, which is foreshadowed in the opening recount of her failed attempts to evade her husband’s angry taunts and coercive control. At the story’s end, the swagman recuperates by a waterhole, while the disfigured body of the young woman – whom he has raped and murdered – is misidentified by a local boundary rider as the mangled carcass of a slaughtered sheep. Similarly, in ‘Squeaker’s Mate’ (1902), Baynton’s most anthologised story, the author again provides a horrific account of the dangers faced by women who find themselves alone in the bush with violent, possessive, and ineffective men (and with unallied women too). In the opening scene, the ironically named Squeaker’s ‘mate’ is felling timber when she is paralysed by a falling tree that swiftly breaks her back. Terminally disabled and neglected by her feckless husband, the woman who had once ‘hard-grafted with the best of them’ (161) is permanently reduced to – in the eyes of her husband – a ‘dumb and motionless cripple,’ a shameful and inexpiable burden who he must keep alive (165). Likewise, the women in the community soon desert her, offering their domestic services and their sympathy to her husband instead. Isolated socially, and physically confined to an old shed, Squeaker’s mate is eventually replaced with another woman who is everything she is not: young, able-bodied, and fertile; she is a woman who evinces ‘imminent motherhood’ (166). On several levels, the sheer violence that Squeaker’s mate endures is decidedly gendered; however, Baynton’s achievement is not so much her vehement rebuke to male violence but her damning criticism of callous indifference to that violence, which of course has catastrophic effects for women. As Leigh Dale explains, ‘what is at stake for women in Baynton’s Bush Studies is literally life and death’ (376). For Squeaker’s mate, as for most of Baynton’s women, travel is inseparable from travail; it is perilous work and it is perilous resistance as well. Indeed, for many contemporary wanderers, forced to travel by need or necessity, travel is not a languid pursuit but a mandatory sentence, often one without hope of rest or the promise of safe return. Today, an increasing number of women’s travel narratives are marked by reluctant wandering of both the literal and figurative kind. These works, which discard linear modes of travelling, are usually narrated by a highly reflexive and reconfigured self whose movement through space and time is determined by one’s subject position and whose movement forms, therefore, what Rosi Braidotti calls a ‘politically invested cartography’ or ‘living map’ (4, 10). Michelle Dicinoski’s travel memoir, Ghost Wife (2013), is a good example of a contemporary exercise in reluctant wandering. The memoir, which was published before the passing of Australia’s Marriage Amendment Act, recounts Dicinoski’s attempt to find queer kinship as she travels to Canada to marry her partner, Heather. As the couple make the long journey from Brisbane to Toronto, Dicinoski recalls the untold stories of same-sex couples from Australia’s past. ‘To go forward,’ she says, ‘I must first go back’ (32). Specifically, to bypass the laws of linearity, Dicinoski configures her narrator, Michelle, as a ‘ghost wife’ whose disembodied existence allows her to transcend the boundaries of linear time as well as the spatial boundaries of the various cities she wanders through. The memoir is essentially an account of vagrancy, which is heightened by the invisibility of the couple’s marriage and which reflects their dispossession as Australian citizens who are denied the right to marry. As Michelle explains: Heather and I would be ghosts of a different kind when we returned to Australia … we would be flesh and blood and married, but in a marriage that was invisible to just about everyone, invisible to history, invisible to the law. Except for a marriage certificate from another country, we would leave no paper trace. (15) The figuration of the ghost wife, then, like Frame’s figuration of the migratory bird, legitimises Michelle’s experience of being (or not being) in the world. This position, which is marked by 361

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anonymity and detachment, creates a spatial paradox that allows Michelle to be everywhere and nowhere at once, to be neither relegated to the past nor consigned to an unknown future. In fact, it is Michelle’s experience of spatio-temporal simultaneity that allows her to meet with other ghost wives and to record silenced or discarded queer histories from Australia’s past. In this way, reluctant wandering is a way of bearing witness to the im/mobility of other wandering women. For example, as Michelle and Heather hire a rental car and drive north towards Toronto, Michelle contemplates the passage of time and how ‘sometimes when you arrive in a place, it can feel like an ending and a beginning at once’ (22). At this point, the narrative recedes 100 years to 1891. In the first of many narrative interjections, the reader follows Lilian Cooper and her partner, Josephine Bedford, as they board a ship in Tilbury and migrate to Australia. The women, who are ‘utterly different in personality’ but also ‘inseparable,’ are the uncanny doubles of Heather and Michelle (23). Therefore, as Michelle and Heather wander through Newburyport, the narrative telescopes on Lilian and Josephine as they explore the motley town of 1890s Brisbane. Here as elsewhere, the city, like the women’s history, is reconstructed through the narrator’s recollections. As Michelle, speaking of Lilian and Josephine, concludes: The two will spend their lives together in a succession of houses in inner-city Brisbane, the last overlooking the river at Kangaroo Point. They will visit the United States, and later go to Serbia to work in tent hospitals during World War I. And when all this doing is done, they will be buried side by side in Toowong Cemetery in Brisbane’s inner west, in a plot the size and shape of a double bed. (25) In Ghost Wife, this paratactic structure, which oscillates back and forth in space and time, allows Michelle to connect to a different space-time: one that exists in the future (that is, in Michelle’s present), but one that also exists simultaneously as a forgotten history of Australia’s past. In the end, it is only through remembering – by travelling back through the bends and elbows of the mind  – that Dicinoski is able to create a counter-memory: one that not only contributes to Australia’s queer history but one which enhances her own visibility as a queer woman. As Dicinoski herself confirms, [t]he book isn’t only attempting to save the narrator and the other ghost stories from oblivion; it’s also an attempt by a writer in the world to save herself and the things she loves from oblivion. It’s arrogant and fruitless, but don’t all of us do this, at least a little, this wondering back while we wander (and wonder) forward? (qtd in Cantrell)

Returning to The Is-Land Before she left for England, Frame wrote her first will, a document which her biographer, Michael King, believed she intended to be her last testament (King 131). In her will, Frame, who was only in her early 20s at the time, made her final wishes clear: she requested that all of her private letters be burned; that any money in her possession be left to her friend and mentor, Frank Sargeson; and that her family home in Oamaru be leased rent-free to ‘any writer, young or old, who has no place to live in peace’ – the only condition being that they ‘treat the earth and its vegetation as alive, leave the creek to flow, and not uproot the old trees, but plant new ones too’ (132). Finally, Frame instructed the Public Trustee to ‘leave [her] body to be placed unclothed, without funeral rites, in an unpolished coffin, and buried some place in New Zealand … where snow falls in August and the sea is heard’ (132). Three years after her death, the Janet Frame Literary Trust published Towards Another Summer, a work that Frame refused to publish while alive because it was, in her words, ‘embarrassingly personal’ (245). However, on the discovery of two typed and bound copies 362

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of the manuscript, the Trust concluded that Frame ‘anticipated publication’ and subsequently prepared the work for posthumous release (Gordon qtd in Frame 242). The fact that Frame believed her novella – a complicated love letter to New Zealand – too autobiographical to publish says something of the complex relationship that Antipodean writers continue to have, not only with home, but with the way they perceive their work and its importance, both at home and abroad.

Works Cited Adey, Peter. Mobility. London: Routledge, 2017. Banfield, E.J. The Confessions of a Beachcomber. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1908. Barrett, Charles. The Bush Ramblers: A Story for Australian Children. Melbourne: T.S. Fitchett, 1913. Baynton, Barbara. ‘Squeaker’s Mate.’ 1902. Lee, Turning the Century. 158–171. ———. ‘The Chosen Vessel’. 1902. Lee, Turning the Century. 291–297. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Bryson, Bill. Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country. London: Doubleday, 2000. Burney, Frances. The Wanderer; or Female Difficulties. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814. Cantrell, Kate. Interview with Michelle Dicinoski. 22 Jan. 2014. Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. Clarke, Robert. Travel Writing from Black Australia: Utopia, Melancholia, and Aboriginality. New York: Routledge, 2016. Clune, Frank. Roaming Round Europe: Random Rambles in Paris, Eire, Iceland, Vienna, and Belgium. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1954. ———. Roaming Round New Zealand: The Story of a Holiday Trip. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1956. Cresswell, Tim. The Tramp in America. London: Reaktion, 2001. ———. ‘Towards a Politics of Mobility.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28.1 (2010): 17–31. Dale, Leigh. ‘Rereading Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies.’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 53.4 (2011): 369–386. Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Dicinoski, Michelle. Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance. Melbourne: Black Inc, 2013. Fortier, Anne-Marie. ‘Migration Studies.’ The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities. Ed. Peter Adey et al. London: Routledge, 2014. 64–73. Frame, Janet. The Lagoon and Other Stories. London: Bloomsbury, 1952. ———. An Autobiography: To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table, The Envoy from Mirror City. Auckland: Random House, 1989. ———. Towards Another Summer. Sydney, NSW: Vintage, 2007. ‘Free Tour to Great Britain and Europe. The Chance of a Life Time.’ Australian War Memorial. c.1914–18. . Gildersleeve, Jessica. Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision. New York: Cambria, 2017. Gunn, Jeannie. We of the Never-Never. London: Hutchinson, 1908. Hannam, Kevin, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry. ‘Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings.’ Mobilities 1.1 (2006): 1–22. Horrocks, Ingrid. Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. ———. ‘Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms.’ M/C Journal 22.4 (2019). . Johnson, Clare. ‘Crossing the Border: Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux.’ Antipodes 16.1 (2002): 59–63. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. King, Michael. Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame. Auckland: Penguin, 2000. Langford Ginibi, Ruby. My Bundjalung People. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1994. Lee, Christopher, ed. Turning the Century: Writing of the 1890s. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1999. Massey, Doreen. ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.’ Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. Ed. Jon Bird et al. London: Routledge, 2005. 59–69. McCrum, Mark. No Worries: A Journey through Australia. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997. Morris, Jan. Journeys. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Olsson, Kristina. The China Garden. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009. ———. Shell. Cammeray: Scribner, 2018.

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Kate Cantrell Pesman, Ros, David Walker, and Richard White, ed. The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Scott, Kim. True Country. Fremantle: Fremantle P, 1993. Sheller, Mimi. ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm for a Live Sociology.’ Current Sociology 62.6 (2014): 789–811. Simpson, Colin. ‘Respectable Tourist.’ Sydney Morning Herald 7 Nov. 1966: 6. Skeggs, Beverley. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge, 2013. Theroux, Paul. The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1992. Tsiolkas, Christos. Dead Europe. London: Atlantic, 2005. Turner, Ethel. Seven Little Australians. New York: Ward, Lock, and Bowden, 1894. White, Richard. ‘The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War.’ Kunapipi 18.2 (1996): 116–129. ———. ‘Armchair Tourism: The Popularity of Australian Travel Writing.’ Sold by the Millions: Australia’s Best Sellers. Ed. Toni Johnson-Woods and Amit Sarwal. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. 182–202. White, Richard, and Justine Greenwood. ‘Australia.’ The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing. Ed. Carl Thompson. New York: Routledge, 2016. 404–414.

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37 AUSTRALIA’S LONG RELATIONSHIP WITH ROMANCE Tanya Dalziell

When Joyce Dingwell was interviewed by The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine in September 1959, her reputation as a romance novelist was on the rise. As the Weekly pointed out to its readers, Dingwell had published ten novels to date with Mills and Boon, the romance publisher; she would go on to write over eighty books under her own name as well as the pseudonym, Kate Starr. The reason for the article was that the Weekly was serialising Dingwell’s latest novel, The Girl at Snowy River, which Mills and Boon also issued in the same year. (It was later republished in 1964, 1975 and 1982, and was included in a three-in-one Harlequin volume in 1972). As part of the promotion, readers were given details of Dingwell’s firsthand knowledge of the hydroelectric project that serves as the setting for the novel, and were provided with an additional teaser that centred on the main characters, Prudence Brierly, ‘a pretty young English lass who has come to Australia to escape the cold weather,’ and a ‘handsome young Australian engineer’ named – as one might only dare hope – Smoke Lawless (Quilkey 31). As the Weekly relates it, when the two meet, ‘[s]he [Prudence] senses he [Smoke] is annoyed at her arrival and realises he considers women in the construction camps a nuisance. That’s only the start of this rich, human story …’ (31). By the late 1950s, many Australian readers of the Weekly would have been familiar with both the company that was publishing Dingwell’s novel in its entirety and the romantic storyline the Weekly’s publicity material and ellipses hinted at. Following the Second World War, Mills and Boon had become synonymous with the heterosexual romance novel (see McAleer). Its introduction of standardised book covers, narrative length and plot was partly a pragmatic response to post-war paper rationing in the United Kingdom but it was also a canny marketing strategy that came to make its titles instantly recognisable across the world, including in Australia. Mills and Boon did not have the Australian romance market to itself, however. The Australian publishing industry had its own romance boom when imported American fiction was banned in 1939. As Toni Johnson-Woods’s research into this flourishing business shows, ‘[o]vernight printers turned publishers as they scrambled to fill the railway stands with cheap novelettes. Romances soon rolled off the presses of companies such as Invincible Press, Calvert Books and Cleveland Publishing’ (‘1980: Romancing Australia’ 375). Clearly, these presses and Dingwell had a shared conviction: romance sells, and pays. As Dingwell pragmatically informed the Weekly’s competitor, The Australian Woman’s Mirror, over a decade earlier, ‘[i]f you write what papers want, you generally get your reward’ (Clio 12). Within the world of Dingwell’s romance, her heroine too gets her reward, albeit of a different kind. In the final October instalment of The Girl at Snowy River, a cave-in that traps the working men underground releases both Prudence’s repressed feelings for Smoke and a disclosure from him that explains his past indifferent behaviour towards her – ‘Every 365

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bad thing in my life has been associated with a woman,’ Smoke tells her (68). In the face of this admission, Prudence’s repeated declaration to Smoke that ‘I am your woman,’ which concludes the story, suggests his luck has changed for the better at last (68). Contributors to online forums and discussion boards dedicated to the history of popular Australian romances today often recognise Dingwell as the nation’s first author to be published by Mills and Boon (see, for example, Laura Vivanco’s guest post in Lhuede). It is an honour that picks up Joseph McAleer’s scholarly claim that Dingwell ‘was Mills and Boon’s first native Australian author’ (102) and sidesteps the contributions of Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, an Australian expatriate, who earlier wrote numerous volumes for Mills and Boon including the blockbuster The Red Mirage (1913). Nevertheless, this singling out of Dingwell serves as a starting point for acknowledging the subsequent successful careers of other Australian romance authors such as Helen Bianchi, Dorothy Cork, Anne Hampson, Kerry Allyne, Marion Lennox and Margaret Way. It also provides an origin story about popular romances in Australia that perhaps complicates Kelly McWilliam’s claim that it was only with the introduction of a local commissioning editor in 2006 to the Sydney branch of the global conglomerate Harlequin-Mills and Boon that local content was created specifically for a national market (143). Admittedly, Dingwell’s The Girl at Snowy River – to take but one case in point – was regarded by some at the time of its publication as a book that would appeal primarily to British readers. Alan Boon (of Mills and Boon) sent a copy of it to the Minister of Immigration at Australia House in London on that very assumption, recommending it as propaganda presumably on the basis of the lead character’s decision to leave England for Australia, and her finding of adventure and romance (McAleer 103). Yet, the volume arguably enacted a double address. While it might have conjured a land of exotic appeal and romantic potential for readers elsewhere, the title alone of Dingwell’s The Girl at Snowy River would have had many Australian readers recalling AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s poem, ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (1890), the nation’s preeminent folk ballad. This similarity might help to explain why later critics and commentators oftentimes recall the title, incorrectly, as The Girl from Snowy River. And it is telling that the novel is not named The Girl at the Snowy Mountain Hydro-Electric Scheme, which would have made for a clunky heading that ill-fitted the slim proportions of the physical dimensions of text. As Johnson-Woods has argued, book covers ‘are semiotically charged marketing tools; the artwork, design and titles emit generic and cultural messages,’ and titles matter (‘Crikey, it’s a Bromance’ 154). Dingwell herself conceived of her romance as addressing a distinctly Australian subject, and wondered aloud to the Weekly, ‘I cannot understand why other Australian writers have never felt attracted to writing about this fascinating period of Australian history’ (qtd in Quilkey 31). Australia might have been an enticing location for some (international) readers, but for an Australian audience, whom Dingwell also very much had in mind, the setting of The Girl at Snowy River was very familiar and topical. Yet, the overall point to take from McWilliam’s attention to the modern romance publishing industry is that the genre seems to invite this manner of examination more so than any other narrative form. Most accounts of popular romance mention to varying degrees their subjects’ material conditions of production in a way that discussions of the novels by Nobel Prize-winning Australian author, Patrick White, say, are not seemingly compelled to do. In part, this emphasis treats these popular novels as commodities rather than art objects, and suggests that they circulate in economies of value that are not primarily aesthetic ones. This pervasive understanding of, or assumption about, romance novels goes some way to explaining why – despite the Weekly’s enthusiastic attempts to recognise that The Girl at Snowy River made an original contribution to Australian letters because it ‘is the first Australian novel to have as its setting the huge Snowy River project’ (Quilkey 31) – Dingwell is hardly mentioned in scholarly accounts of Australian literature. Nor is she commemorated at large in the broader culture. Her work is not discussed in authoritative compendiums such as The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009) or The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009), and she receives no entry in the encyclopaedic 366

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reference volume The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1994). Her image and poesy certainly do not grace the national currency, a privilege afforded Paterson’s portrait and verse today. She does, however, now have an important place in histories and accounts that focus expressly on the popular romance genre. In this ‘niche’ context, her contributions are admitted and celebrated. To the extent that Dingwell might serve as an exemplar of how popular heterosexual romance and its authors have been largely regarded, or disregarded, by Australian academic literary criticism, it is worth remembering that this scholarship was overwhelmingly focused for much of the twentieth century on creating and defending, as well as critiquing, a serious national literary tradition in the face of doubts that there ever was one. Popular romance fiction of the kind written by Dingwell was not an obvious ally in this effort. Australian feminist literary criticism from the 1970s onwards, which sought to counter the masculinist bent of that nationalist project and which might have been otherwise predisposed to considering the contributions of women’s writing in all its forms to the national culture (see, for example, Magarey, Rowley and Sheridan), was instead inclined to sympathise with, and take heed of, the lesson learnt by Sybylla Melvyn, the writer-protagonist of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901). Now held up as a canonical Australian novel, My Brilliant Career has served as a touchstone for many feminist critics interested in the feisty female character or ‘type’ – the Australian Girl – that emerged in romance fiction (as well as the popular press) at the turn of the twentieth century. This is so even as, or perhaps because, Franklin’s text goes out of its way to reject the romance genre (see Dalziell). The Australian Girl which the romance gave rise to was a figure memorably described in one late nineteenth-century text as being ‘without shoes or stockings, or gloves and with untidy hair’; she is definitely not ‘a girl that would be afraid of the night, or the bush, or the bay, or anybody, or anything’ (Hennessey 85). Whereas early colonial romances might have attributed their female protagonists the role of shoring up ideas of empire while underscoring the rightness of domestic feminine virtue, often these Australian Girls were imagined to enjoy a newfound freedom that the colonies were positively thought to afford white women. They might also expect a love match founded on affection between equals, and ideally between Australians (rather than between an Australian Girl and an English suitor), which cemented colonial settlement and announced nascent nationalism in romantic terms. Franklin’s Sybylla, however, sought a future for herself other than that of wife and mother. Indeed, when the wealthy landowner, Harold Beecham, proposes marriage, Sybylla’s immediate impulse is to strike him with a horsewhip. This unconventional rejection of a suitor has something to do with Sybylla’s uncertainty about her desirability and also her distrust of the romance narrative from which the proposal scene could otherwise have been easily lifted. After all, Sybylla’s career begins unpromisingly because she writes a romance novel ‘in which a full-fledged hero and heroine performed the duties of a hero and heroine in the orthodox manner’ (Franklin 43). A local publisher rejects the manuscript with the counsel that its author would be better off studying ‘the best works of literature’ (43). It is advice that the novel itself does not entirely endorse, but Franklin’s introductory comments to it unambiguously single out romance as that which she pits her book against in her efforts to write an authentic Australian story: This is not a romance – I have too often faced the music of life to the tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and dreams; neither is it a novel, but simply a yarn – a real yarn... You can dive into this story head first as it were. Do not fear encountering such trash as descriptions of beautiful sunsets and whisperings of wind. (1) Such strident declarations were underwritten and intensified by wider debates taking place over what might constitute national stories and identities, with Australia becoming a federated nation in 1901. Yet, if Franklin’s comments can be read as any gauge, it would also seem to be a period when love romances were ubiquitous. That Franklin could reference romance by listing such tropes so casually but confidently suggests how familiar she assumed her readers were with the genre. 367

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When Franklin was writing My Brilliant Career, the triple-decker Victorian domestic romance was well established and well circulated by lending libraries both at, and across, the centre of empire and in the colonies in Australia. In that context, romances can be recognised as part and parcel of the colonial, and then globalising, project that sought to draw geographically distant people and places into complex economic and ideological relations. It was not that readers in the colonies consumed English romances unthinkingly, however, or that authors simply mimicked received stories. While it is true that the commercial success of writers such as H. Rider Haggard gripped colonial imaginations and marketplaces, and inspired others in the late nineteenth century to emulate the plots of King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She: A History of Adventure (1887), mid-century authors such as Henry Kingsley and Catherine Helen Spence, for example, turned to romances to tell their tales of specific colonial experiences, of three settler families and the Adelaide goldrush period in their respective romances, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859) and Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever (1854). But the romance form in which they wrote was coming under some external pressures in colonial Australia by the emergence of local publications such as the ‘family’ magazine, the Australian Journal. The Australian Journal took advantage of developing technologies to print issues simultaneously in Melbourne and Sydney, and attracted significant numbers of readers because of the relatively low cover price. Romance, of a certain vein, was among the genres singled out for particular attention in its first editorial of 2 September 1865: The ablest COLONIAL pens of the day will be engaged on our staff. Historical Romances and Legendary Narratives of the old country, will be mingled with Tales of Venture and Daring in the new; Nouvellettes, whose scenes will be laid in every nation, varied occasionally with Fairy Stories for the Young, and Parlour Pastimes for boys and girls. (‘To Our Readers’ 1; original emphasis) This policy changed in the early 1870s, when a firm editorial commitment to stories with Australian settings and themes was made, although the 1880s and 1890s definitely saw material published that did not conform to that mandate. The aim was nonetheless to serve diverse literary interests, and during the late nineteenth century the Australian Journal, along with other magazines such as The Australian Town and Country Journal, consistently published short romance stories and sketches that were less historical and fantastical, and more of the love-interest type that would have been instantly recognisable to Franklin and her character, Sybylla. Among the many, many stories of motives and identities mistaken, estranged lovers eventually reconciled, and various attempts at matchmaking, the titles in these volumes included anonymous romantic comedies such as ‘Dr Trim’s Romance’ (1898) and Lillian Turner’s ‘A Wayside Romance’ (1897), which commenced with both confidence and doubt about the claims its title made: This is a love story. That is to say, she who was intrusted with many of its secrets and pains, she who took a keyhole view of the down-slipping of a man, and the maywardness [sic] of a woman – she called it a love story and wondered at the love in it. (37) Along with these short sketches, it is the Australian romance novels that were written and published in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century that have captured the attention of recent literary scholars. Many of these titles by authors such as Mabel Forrest, Mary Gaunt, Marie Bjelke Petersen as well ‘Tasma’ ( Jessie Couvreur), Caroline Leakey and ‘Iota’ (Mrs Mannington Caffyn) have been republished, therefore making them more accessible and known; years before, they were very often also serialised in newspapers and magazines in much the same way that, many decades later, the Weekly serialised Dingwell’s Mills and Boon novel. During the 1990s, a selection of these novels became particularly resonant for literary 368

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critics whose wider training, and political commitment, rested with developments in feminist and postcolonial interpretive frameworks. What the intersection of these interests produced was the recognition that romances were far from forms of light entertainment: they were read as performing significant ideological work. These texts were seen as rehearsing feats of empire that were by no means settled in the wider context they registered; offering new models of white femininity that were often predicated on the troubling displacement and effacement of indigenous characters, and so dramatised the dovetailing of white female desires with colonial and nationalist concerns; and redrawing the boundaries of Australian literature itself. Fiona Giles underscores this latter point in the introduction to her book, Too Far Everywhere: The Romantic Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Australia (1998). Looking around at the available scholarship at the time she was researching late nineteenth-century romance fiction written by women, Giles noted, ‘[i]n Australian literary history, the disappearance from public view of the nineteenthcentury heroine, together with the romance novels in which she is portrayed, is literal enough’ (3). Recognising that her project of recovery had much in common with other feminist work in cognate fields at the time, Giles’s study sought to value these earlier romances both aesthetically and as a means to glean insight into their historical contexts. In Giles’s account, and against received assumptions that romances are merely formulaic, these romance texts are recognised as experimenting with genre, and testing models of white femininity. Furthermore, and as a consequence of the ‘seriousness of their literary allusions and the care with which they embellish the heroine’s quest with precise material and historical detail,’ these texts additionally ‘point to the documentary role of much nineteenth-century colonial fiction’ (19). Studying romance meant calling into question how, and why, Australian literature itself had been formulated and understood up to that point. At the same time, Giles’s concern to underscore the novels’ claims to verisimilitude registers the dominant claims made for realism as part of the collective scholarly effort (Franklin is but one contributor to it) to forge a distinctly ‘Australian’ literary tenor and culture. The more recent publication of two volumes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century short stories by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver suggests how the boundaries of romance also continue to shift. Read side by side, these volumes – The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction (2010) and The Anthology of Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction (2011) – set up their own parameters around the colonial romance. Perhaps in order to make their selected texts accessible and understandable to a contemporary audience for whom the term ‘romance’ might more immediately conjure notions of love, one volume is clearly announced as being a collection of colonial romances that have much in common with novels of the time, such as Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890) and Ada Cambridge’s A Marked Man (1890), in that they oftentimes query the social conventions that result in dubious marriages. Hsu-Ming Teo suggests that while late colonial Australian love stories were oftentimes unconvinced by the results of romantic love, post-Federation novels largely enjoy happy endings because the impediments to love and marriage were surmountable by ‘Australian character... culture and environment’ (1). The introduction sets out the understandings of romance that underpin the collection: Romance fiction always gives us a heroine of some kind who must make her way in the world, negotiating a future for herself through an often complex network of choices and distinctions to do not only with love and relationships but with social conventions, financial security and career destinations. (Gelder and Weaver, Colonial Australian Romance Fiction 1) The other volume contains adventure fiction that Gelder and Weaver suggest was the ‘most significant popular genre in Australia, the one that most authentically resonated with colonial experience’ for many colonial authors (Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction 1). The genre was also given to flights of imagination and fancy, with Gelder and Weaver recognising that ‘[a]dventure fiction 369

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takes its characters on a journey into unknown territories and regions; it can therefore sometimes overlap with fantasy fiction, especially if it populates those regions with strange people and their peculiar customs’ (1). Book-length examples of this genre include J.D. Hennessey’s An Australian Bush Track (1896), J.F. Hogan’s The Lost Explorer (1890) and Ernest Favenc’s The Secret of the Australian Desert (189?) and The Last of Six: Tales of the Austral Tropics (1893), with Robert Dixon, among others, writing persuasively about the ways in which these romances can be read as ‘one important site of the struggle of men and women for historical agency at a time when traditional gender roles were under review’ (99). This claim can be extended into more recent contexts to consider how narratives such as Doris Pilkington Garimara’s (Nugi Garimara) Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) arguably complicate or hybridise the romance form in the face of colonial practices that sought to deny agency to certain people on the basis of race. Part memoir, part biography, part history, part novel and part oral transcription, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence centres on three Mardudjara girls from the East Pilbara. Molly, Daisy and Gracie were forcibly taken from their community of Jigalong to the Moore River Settlement near Perth, Western Australia, in 1931. After a short period at the Settlement, the girls escape and begin their walk towards home, some 1,600 kilometres away, by following the fence that stretches from the northern to the southern coast of Western Australia. The loose, episodic structure of the text recalls the form of the quest romance, with the girls’ desire to return home progressing the narrative. As such, the adoption of the romance frame and plot by the film of the same name is hardly surprising, but it does raise a number of issues regarding the relations between colonialism and romance that the book confronts. Directed by Philip Noyce for Rumalara Films, Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) provides the closure, the return home, that the quest plot works towards and big-screen cinema requires. Yet, and unlike the film, Pilkington Garimara’s narrative makes clear that returning home to Jigalong is neither the story’s end nor a resolution to the trauma that forced separation involves. If the removal of indigenous children was conducted, in part, in the name of racist policies of assimilation, then the refusal to assimilate romance conventions for the telling of this story is crucial. The ‘ending’ of the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence relates how Molly and her two children (including Doris) were taken again to the Moore River Settlement in 1941. To say the very least, this circumstance suggests how colonial practices founded on racial hierarchies and prejudice can deny romance’s promise of return. While the distinction between ‘romance’ and ‘adventure’ that Gelder and Weaver’s anthologies make is perhaps familiar for readers today, it was a lot less clear-cut for colonial authors and readers in the late nineteenth century. For them, the term ‘romance’ covered narratives involving romantic entanglements, stories that told of exploratory journeys into unknown places and required various obstacles to be overcome before a return home could be made triumphantly, and tales that combined the two romances. Rosa Campbell Praed’s Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (1902) is a case in point. It tells of a Danish explorer, Eric Hansen, searching for gold, and Anne Bedo, an Australian Girl searching for freedom from her husband. The two venture together into the unknown interior territory of colonial Queensland. What they unearth is not gold (there is no need for a fortune to be uncovered as Anne is revealed as an unexpected heiress) but rather knowledge about a lost race of red people, the Acans. An erupting volcano destroys the Acan race (and Anne’s husband), leaving Anne and Hansen to acknowledge their mutual attraction and relate their tale before royalty at Albert Hall, at the centre of empire, thus resolving the anxieties their adventure sets in motion. The alluring Acan queen had threatened to undo the intrepid Hansen; Anne’s extramarital feeling for her fellow adventurer had put her in some moral peril; and essential whiteness itself (and the authority it assumed in colonial contexts) had been momentarily jeopardised by Anne’s black-facing to escape her unlikeable husband. Yet, the very fact that Gelder and Weaver’s volumes exist, and the present chapter on romance itself has been commissioned and can tell of Praed’s text in this manner, is suggestive of the changes in the status of romance in Australian literary scholarship, and how Australian literature itself 370

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has been conceived and studied differently in the light of them. The value judgement passed on turn-of-the-century romances by Franklin and which Giles detected still at work in the 1990s has been largely replaced by studies that offer a multitude of approaches to them – close readings, biographical interpretations, historical materialist apprehensions, postcolonial accounts. What unites scholarship on the popular romance is the recognition that it is a genre, with complex relationships to practices of readership, meaning-making, systems of value (both economic and aesthetic) and broader sociocultural interests and anxieties. It is now inconceivable that late nineteenth-century romance writers and narratives could be ‘left out’ of Australian literary histories, or that scholarship on them would be seen as less worthy or intrinsically interesting than any other. And while it might be that popular romances today, as well as popular romances past that are attached to mass-market publishers such as Mills and Boon, are dismissed in some contexts and in terms that Franklin relied on more than 100 years ago, they are also now subjects treated with scholarly seriousness. Studies on heterosexual popular romance nimbly emerge from the intersections of Australian literature and cultural studies disciplines, and have also found expression in the establishment of international scholarly journals such as The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (2010–present) to which Australian scholars routinely contribute. These analyses are informed by a wider reevaluation of popular romances within feminist scholarship in particular, but also queer theories, that extends well beyond the national parameters to which this chapter on Australian romances adheres. Queer theorists in particular have been especially attuned to the presumption of heteronormativity that characterises popular romances, while also being attentive to the shifts that have taken place within queer romance. Timothy Conigrave’s memoir Holding the Man (1995), for example, is often recognised as a ground-breaking white gay male romance that is nevertheless now seen as of its time in that its HIV/AIDS narrative speaks to a particular period in Australian history which doubles as a coming out story to a devoutly religious family. More recent texts such as the historical romance Untamed (2013) by Australian author Anna Cowan, which features crossdressing characters in Regency London and rural England, prompt an interrogation of ‘queer’ (and indeed ‘Australian’) as a category in the first instance. Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) not only recasts received categories – the text is both novel and verse, a romance and a detective fiction – and therefore proposes that queer desire cannot be contained by the forms of conventional romance: it additionally rewrites romance such that its questing, desiring lesbian detective protagonist sets in motion thematic ideas ‘about the necessary instability of dangerous liaisons, and concomitantly, about the perils of obsession,’ as Leigh Dale has suggested (180–181). This determination to engage with the popular romance genre in terms other than evaluative ones marks a shift from earlier accounts of it, exemplified by Germaine Greer’s assessment in The Female Eunuch (1970). Greer dedicated a chapter to demolishing romance in her book, which was to become a ‘classic’ of second-wave feminism. As Greer tells it, her curiosity about romances had been aroused by a (then) recent study that had shown women, ‘especially housewives and secretarial workers,’ were buying – seemingly alarmingly – as many as 80 popular romances a year (Greer 192). This state of affairs was such despite the sexual revolution the 1960s supposedly ushered in. So, she set out to read a selection of romances herself, including The Loving Heart (1960) by the Australian author Lucy Walker (the nom de plume of Dorothy Lucie Sayers). Greer quotes the book’s blurb to set the scene for her critique – ‘another great romantic story of the Australian outback’ (200) – and then offers an acerbic assessment of the text (and the genre as a whole by extension). She reserves her most damning generalisations for the text’s romantic hero (and the feminine fantasy that apparently gives rise to the figure), determining that [t]he traits invented for him have been invented by women cherishing the chains of their bondage. It is a male commonplace that women love rotters but in fact women are hypnotised 371

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by the successful man who appears to master his fate; they long to give their responsibility for themselves into the keeping of one who can administer it in their best interests. (200) Greer’s questionable psychoanalysing aside, her polemic was interventionist and intentionally inflammatory, and it resonated with subsequent studies of popular romance that worried over the images of women these texts promoted; were suspicious of the genre’s mass appeal (and so were grappling with notions of literary aesthetics and value); and wondered at how female readers internalised and resisted, or even formed literary communities around, the representations of desire and agency that Mills and Boon (and Harlequin) titles privileged. While those assessments have not abated within some corners of literary scholarship or the wider culture in which these popular texts circulate and are read, recent scholarship on the romance (both in Australia and elsewhere) has largely moved beyond the value-laden judgements of it that earlier feminist accounts exercised. In From Australia with Love (2004), her history of popular Australian romance from the 1950s to the 1990s, for example, Juliet Flesch is concerned to chart the changes she sees at play in this period by paying close attention to particular texts and authors, including Dingwell. The distance and difference (as well as unlikely points of similarity) between Greer’s assessment of Walker’s novel and more recent interpretations of the Australian ‘outback’ romance is therefore instructive. Some of that scholarship has been concerned to identify and map the history of the ‘romantic story of the Australian outback,’ for instance, and to consider how it correlates with stories Australians like to tell about themselves, ‘egalitarian, optimistic resilient, welcoming,’ although if ‘the reality conforms to this is another question’ (Flesch, ‘The Wider Brown Land and the Big Smoke’ 93, 94). Kylie Mirmohamadi’s work on the recent sub-genre of Australian rural romances takes a slightly different path. Acknowledging that popular romances are far from homogenous, Mirmohamadi focuses on the ‘ru-romances’ that she sees as dating to the release of Rachael Treasure’s Jillaroo (2002), a text that has as its antecedents earlier ‘outback’ romance novels for which Di Morrissey is perhaps best well known. According to Mirmohamadi, these romances register the ‘conditions in rural Australia’ and ‘the cultural and political contexts of Australia’s position as a postcolonial nation, grappling with ongoing issues of inheritance, belonging and authenticity’ (204; see also Martin, ‘Outback Fever’). This argument might seem a far cry from Greer’s earlier damning assessment of popular romances and their ‘utterly ineffectual heroine’ (199). And yet, Greer’s passing observation that the hero of The Loving Heart ‘directly rules a society of loyal retainers, white and relative infantile, as well as black and totally infantile’ (201) gives a passing glimpse into the motivating interests of more recent scholars, who are especially attuned to their subjects’ representations of gender and race, and relations of power.

Works Cited Cambridge, Ada. A Marked Man: Some Episodes in His Life. London: William Heinemann, 1890. Clio. ‘Mirror Readers Who Write: Still Another Who Was Piccaninny-Once.’ Australian Women’s Mirror 11 Jun. 1947: 12, 39. Conigrave, Timothy. Holding the Man. Melbourne, VIC: McPhee Gribble, 1995. Cowan, Anna. Untamed. Melbourne, VIC: Michael Joseph, 2013. Dale, Leigh. ‘Canonising Queer: From Hal to Dorothy.’ JASAL (1998): 172–184. . Dalziell, Tanya. Settler Romances and the Australian Girl. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2004. Dingwell, Joyce. ‘The Girl at Snowy River [Final Instalment].’ Australian Women’s Weekly 21 Oct. 1959. 20–21, 43–44, 49, 53, 55, 63, 66, 68. Dixon, Robert. Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. ‘Dr Trim’s Romance.’ Australian Journal 33.401 (1898): 633–635. Favenc, Ernest. The Last of Six: Tales of the Austral Tropics. Sydney, NSW: Bulletin, 1893.

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Australia’s Long Relationship with Romance ———. The Secret of the Australian Desert. London: Blackie: 189?. Flesch, Juliet. From Australia With Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels. Fremantle, WA: Curtin U Books, 2004. ———. ‘The Wider Brown Land and the Big Smoke: The Setting of Australian Popular Romance.’ Johnson-Woods and Sarwal, Sold by the Millions. 82–95. Franklin, Miles. My Brilliant Career. Preface by Henry Lawson. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1901. Gelder, Ken, and Rachael Weaver, ed. The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2010. ———. ed. The Anthology of Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2011. Giles, Fiona. Too Far Everywhere: The Romantic Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Australia. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1998. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. London: Flamingo, 1993. Hennessey, J.D. An Australian Bush Track. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1896. Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. London: Cassell and Co., 1885. ———. She: A History of Adventure. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1887. Hogan, J.F. The Lost Explorer. London: Ward and Downey, 1890. Johnson-Woods, Toni. ‘Crikey it’s a Bromance: A History of Australian Pulp Westerns.’ Johnson-Woods and Sarwal, Sold by the Millions. 141–161. ———. ‘1980: Romancing Australia – Master of Uluru.’ Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935–2012. Ed. Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni. Clayton, VIC: Monash UP, 2012. 371–377. Johnson-Woods, Toni and Amit Sarwal, ed. Sold by the Millions: Australia’s Bestsellers. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. Jose, Nicholas, ed. The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2009. Kingsley, Henry. The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1860. Lhuede, Elizabeth. ‘Australian Romance Writing – What’s There to Take Seriously?’ Australian Women Writers 13 Feb. 2012. . Magarey, Susan, Sue Rowley, and Susan Sheridan, ed. Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1993. [Martin, Catherine]. An Australian Girl. 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1890. Martin, Susan K. ‘Outback Fever: The Romance of Rural and National Literary Identity in a Networked World.’ Unpublished keynote. Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference. Jul. 2015. Wollongong, Australia. McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. McWilliam, Kelly. ‘Romance in Foreign Accents: Harlequin-Mills and Boon in Australia.’ Continuum 23.2 (2009): 137–145. Mirmohamadi, Kylie. ‘Love on the Land: Australian Rural Romance in Place.’ English Studies 96.2 (2015): 204–224. Noyce, Philip, dir. Rabbit-Proof Fence. Rumalara Films, 2002. Pierce, Peter, ed. The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Pilkington Garimara, Doris (Nugi Garimara). Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1996. Porter, Dorothy. The Monkey’s Mask. South Melbourne, VIC: Hyland House, 1994. Praed, Mrs [Rosa] Campbell. Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush. London: John Long, 1902. Quilkey, Roma. ‘Serial of the Snowy: Exciting Story in New Novel.’ Australian Women’s Weekly 30 Sept. 1959: 31. Teo, Hsu-Ming. ‘“We Have to Learn to Love Imperially”: Love in Late Colonial and Federation Australian Romance Novels.’ Journal of Popular Romance Studies 4.2 (2014): 1–20. Thomas, Helen, ed. Catherine Helen Spence. 1854. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1987. ‘To Our Readers.’ Australian Journal 2 Sept. 1865: 1. Treasure, Rachael. Jillaroo. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin, 2002. Turner, Lillian. ‘A Wayside Romance.’ Town and Country Journal 17 Dec. 1898: 37–39. Walker, Lucy. The Loving Heart. London: Collins, 1960. Wilde, William H, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, ed. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Wylie, I.A.R. The Red Mirage. London: Mills and Boon, 1913.

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38 MAGICAL MIGRATIONS Australian Fairy Tale Traditions and Practices Nike Sulway

Many scholars and writers have described ‘the sea of fairy tales … [as] a vast reservoir of wellknown images, characters, and plots. Fairy tales are the stories that we still have in common, stories we know others know’ (Harries 163). This popular and long-lived idea that fairy tales are stories that we are familiar with relies on a colonial conception of the fairy tale that is a poor fit for the Australian context. As Donald Haase has argued, the twinned assumptions that the genre of fairy tales is universal and that European tales are the standard against which other fairy tale traditions are measured ‘ignores and thus naturalises the colonial history of folk and fairy-tale exchange and entanglements across cultures’ (Bacchilega, ‘Decolonising’ 33). In this chapter, I have avoided using a restrictive definition of fairy tales, largely in order to track some of the ways in which what is described or understood as a fairy tale within the Australian context reflects colonial and ‘post’ colonial ideas about cultural and intercultural traditions and practices. In many ways what is most interesting in considering fairy tales in the Australian context is not what a fairy tale is, but how our collective understanding of what counts as a fairy tale has shifted in response to broader cultural shifts in understanding and perspective within a colonial and ‘post’ colonial context. In order to track some of these shifts, I have included in this discussion tales that are described by their authors, editors, or publishers as fairy tales at the time that they were published.

Colonial Fairy Tales Early Australian fairy tale publications are framed by the white colonial perspectives of collectors, writers, translators, editors, and publishers, including their attempts to imaginatively and creatively colonise the Australian landscape, its people, and its stories. Most of the fairy tales published in Australia at this time were collections of short works, colonial echoes of similar collections published during the same period in Europe by, for example, Joseph Jacobs and Andrew Lang. These collections were often illustrated, either simply or lavishly, and marketed largely towards child readers, or as books to be read to children. Nevertheless, as with those edited by Lang and Jacobs (and earlier Grimm collections) many collections were also informed by ethnographic or anthropological practices and ideas about the role and purpose of storytelling within both white Western and Australian Indigenous cultures. Each publication offers a vision of how white Australians attempted to resolve the various ethical and aesthetic challenges of imposing a European set of storytelling images, ideas, and practices, within a colonial context. In reading these early collections, four dominant colonial fairy tale practices become apparent: collecting and translating Indigenous narratives; creating a fantasy narrative of (white) fairies, and 374

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a European-style white fairy kingdom, in the Australian landscape; creating narratives in which traditional European fairy tale figures ‘migrate’ (willingly or unwillingly) to the Australian continent; and, finally, creating or collecting non-magical tales of ordinary (white) Australian folk.

Collecting Indigenous Narratives During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a range of narratives were collected from Australian Indigenous people and published as fairy tales or folk tales. These publications include works within international collections such as those published by Andrew (and Leonora) Lang, and Australian collections by editors and translators such as Katie Langloh Parker and Sister Agnes. These tales were collected as part of a collecting, editing, and publishing tradition strongly informed by the practices of the Brothers Grimm. Within this collecting paradigm, Indigenous narratives were understood by white collectors, translators, and editors as evidence of a longlived storytelling tradition that was both exotic and endangered. Further, they were informed by a universalising and colonial conception of folk tales, as described by William Bascom, as fictional and secular narratives whose four functions were to entertain, to educate, to provide an escape from the harsh realities of every life, and to validate culture. Further, this colonial/European model of the folktale presumes that folk narratives ‘are generally compact and condensed, repetitive, episodic, and formulaic’ (Benson 20). The collecting and editing practices embodied in these early publications reveal both earnest attempts to preserve what white collectors and publishers perceived as a storytelling tradition (and culture) at the edge of extinction, and a colonial misunderstanding – even fear – of Indigenous storytelling knowledge, traditions, and practices. In the introduction to The Fairy Tale World, Andrew Teverson provides a brief but revealing summary of the processes through which one Australian Indigenous story was transformed before it appeared in the Langs’ Brown Fairy Tale Book in 1910. ‘The Bunyip’ was recorded in note form by an anthropologist, W.H. Dunlop, in 1850. Dunlop did not record either the site or source of his tale. In 1899, Dunlop’s daughter transformed his notes into a narrative, which was subsequently published in the Journal of the Anthropological Society. Leonora Lang then substantively revised the style, focus, and expression of ‘The Bunyip’ for inclusion in the Brown Fairy Tale Book. As Teverson notes, the Langs’ 1910 version of the tale, … though it is purportedly told by Aboriginal Australians, nonetheless presents them as objects of curiosity, establishing a ‘them’ and ‘us’ relationship, in which the apparent subjects of the story become objects of attention, whilst the British reader becomes the observing agency. (8) One of the most overt ways in which this occurs is the tale’s opening: ‘Long, long ago, far, far away on the other side of the world’ (Lang 71). It is a framing of the tale that explicitly locates it at a geographic and temporal distance from the tale’s audience and teller, and adapts the well-known English fairy tale opening that locates English-language fairy tales ‘once upon a time’ in a far away land. Elsewhere, this Othering of Indigenous culture within an ostensibly Indigenous narrative is foregrounded in the way that Indigenous language and culture are presented as foreign or exotic. ‘It is quite clear,’ as Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario notes, ‘that the indigenous teller has been overwritten, replaced by the voice of the collector, and … elided into the image of a single indigenous body’ (20). Additionally, whereas in the 1899 print publication of the tale the Indigenous people are ‘unchecked by any fear … The country was all their own, or there were too many of them to dread an attack’ (qtd in Teverson 8), in the Langs’ revision ‘this observation has disappeared, along with any potential anticolonial sentiment’ (Teverson 8). Whatever the narrative style or voice of the tale as originally told to Dunlop in 1850, the Langs’ 1910 retelling reflects Leonora Lang’s 375

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editorial understanding that a folk or fairy tale should be told in simple, direct language, and be compact, condensed, secular, fictional, and formulaic. A more local, immediate, and substantive example of a white collector of Indigenous narratives is Parker, whose Australian Legendary Tales: Folklore of the Noongabarrahs as Told to the Piccaninnies (1897) and More Australian Legendary Tales (1898) were both introduced by Andrew Lang and published by David Nutt in London, in a series called ‘Fairy Tales of the British Empire.’ A few years later, and perhaps in response to support or prompting from Andrew Lang, Parker published a more explicitly scholarly and ethnographic work: The Euahlayi Tribe: A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia (1905). Parker’s prefaces and paratextual material (such as her glossaries of Indigenous language) make explicit the sources of her tales, the process of her collecting, and her intentions as a collector, translator, and transcriber of Indigenous tales. Her collections have continued to occupy an ambivalent place in Australian literary and ethnographic history. On publication, the Australian Anthropological Journal praised her methodology, noting that the materials as printed have not been altered by additions of her own imagination, but have been translated as strictly as possible in a true and unaltered manner from the versions given in the Aboriginal speeches by the elders of the tribe. (qtd in Muir 171) However, later commentators have noted the unequal relationship between Parker and her subjects, and the clear possibility that her collections, while intended as faithful literary (or print) iterations of Indigenous traditional narratives, may in fact be something altogether different: a hybrid text that uneasily attempts to express or construct a stable vision of the Other within a colonial framework. As Donald Haase has noted, ‘the colonialist trespassing that occurs in collecting, editing, and translating is not only a matter of … what is preserved. Equally important is the fact that these acts of trespass produce something new – a transcultural text’ (30). Fairy Tales Told in the Bush (1911) by Sister Agnes (Agnes Row) is a collection of six tales, one of which she describes as ‘told to the writer by Old King Barak, the last King of the Yarra tribe, a few days before his death’ (v), and two others of which are not traditional Indigenous tales, but contemporary ‘original’ tales (‘The Magic Gun’ and ‘The Underground River’). ‘The Magic Gun’ is a strong example of an uneasy transcultural text. In it, King Barak is both storyteller and character: the tale has a frame narrative in which Barak is described ‘outside his hut, at Coranderrk, surrounded by white people’ (21) one of whom, a boy called Tom, asks to see the magic gun, and hear its story. The tale Barak tells Tom is about a gun owned by William Buckley ‘the white man who was lost and lived among the blacks’ (22). The main focus of the narrative included in Sister Agnes’s collection, however, is not the tale that Barak tells Tom, but a story involving Tom’s theft of the gun from Barak, who ‘was in a drunken sleep and had not locked his door’ (23) and attempts to use it to shoot a kangaroo and, later, a bunyip. The tale may describe Barak (William Barak, 1824–1903) as the last king of the Yarra, but it also depicts him as a ‘dirty old chief ’ (21): a tourist attraction who rails at the whites, ‘you come to see black man, black man make native fire, black man throw boomerang, black man throw spear; white man give him black brother pennies, pah, white man greedy, no give black man baccy, only pennies’ (21), before they wander off to see the ‘funny black babies’ (21). This tale, which Sister Agnes describes as one of her most popular, portrays the Indigenous leader at its centre as a source of historical and magical wisdom, but also as a powerless and pathetic figure. Further, the tale’s main focus is on Tom’s relationship to the magic gun: his fascination with its status as a magical object, his readiness to steal it from its Indigenous owner, his incapacity to fully understand or wield its magic, and finally his scepticism about the gun’s heritage and magical qualities. As such, the tale offers a vivid analogy for the practices of colonial story collectors, who (like Tom) evinced interest in traditional storytelling that was often

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expressed in acts of appropriation (cultural theft), misrepresentation, and misuse, and was underscored by an intercultural misunderstanding of Indigenous narratives as fictional folk narratives.

The Ancient Kingdom of (White) Australian Fairies One early and persistent trend in the invention and ongoing renovation of an Australian fairy tale tradition is reflected in tales in which a racially and culturally white population of fairies are imagined as pre-invasion inhabitants of the Australian landscape. Atha Westbury’s Australian Fairy Tales (1897) includes an example of this type of Australian fairy tale in ‘Twilight,’ which tells the tale of Brock the barber, from Fitzroy, who is conscripted into a world of fairy intrigue by Baron Thimble. Baron Thimble is a small fairy with something of an Irish brogue, who nevertheless tells Brock that he is Baron Thimble of Faydell Twilight. Ours is a vast kingdom in the centre of Australia, of which very little is known by man. The Anglo-Saxon has penetrated into every corner of the known globe, and thrust his inquisitive nose into the socket of the North Pole, but he has never set foot in the land of Twilight. (55) When Brock and Thimble travel to Twilight, Brock discovers himself in a distinctively European landscape, filled with the song of nightingales and the scent of roses, and a golden palace with gables and turrets rising among ‘richest foliage’ (62). James Hume Cook’s 1925 publication Australian Fairy Tales, illustrated by Christian Yandell, is also a notable example of this trend in Australian fairy tales. As Organ notes, when Cook’s book was published in Australia, it was preceded by ‘numerous stories about local fairies … including the many small booklets, articles and monographs by artist Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and her sister Annie from 1903, and May Gibbs’ fairy-like Gumnut Babies from 1916’ (62). In the introduction to Cook’s Australian Fairy Tales, former Prime Minister William Hughes describes these as tales of the ‘dwellers in Australian Fairy Land,’ and states that while ‘[h]itherto the fairies we have known … have had their habitat in far-off lands … we are now able to wander through the enchanted bush with real Australian fairy princes and princesses’ (10). As the book progresses, we are introduced to this Australian fairy royalty both through Cook’s text and Yandell’s illustrations. They have names such as Prince Waratah and Princess Wattle Blossom, are dressed in ‘shimmering wings and glittering diadems and wands’ (10), and housed in distinctly European castles located in urban landscapes. As a whole, the collection’s stories and illustrations offer a vision of a vaguely medieval, Arthurian ‘once upon a time’ in which slender, ethereal, wealthy, urban royal fairies might ride on chairs led by Australian native birds and have names that echo those of Australian flora and fauna, but whose bodies and facial features, clothing, architecture, and social and cultural practices mark them as distinctly historical (rather than contemporary) and European.

Transportation and Migration Tales A third tradition in early Australian fairy tales involves the depiction of European, and in particular British, fairy tale figures as migrants to the Australian landscape. Westbury’s Australian Fairy Tales also includes a range of tales that feature magical creatures or objects who, like the narratives’ white colonial protagonists, are migrants from the northern hemisphere. ‘I Don’t Know,’ for example, tells the tale of a range of magical toys that ‘were born in the same place, we were sent out in the same ship to Australia’ (100), while ‘Gumtree Hollow’ tells the story of Charlie’s encounter with McKombo, an Irish fairy who tells Charlie ‘Captain Brophy imported me to the colony in

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a hat-box twenty years ago’ (118). These imported or migrant denizens of the fairy tale world are often the companions or supporters of their white colonial counterparts, offering financial, magical, and material support or (as in the case of ‘I Don’t Know’) moral lessons regarding the proper behaviour of young children. Ethel English’s Australian Fairy Tales (1925) includes examples of tales in which fairy tale figures, familiar from Irish, English, and other European fairy tales, are discovered at home in the Australian landscape. ‘Pearlie the Mermaid,’ for instance, tells the story of five-year-old Harold, who lives ‘in a nice bungalow in Narrabeen’ (79) and whose Uncle George encounters Pearlie, ‘Queen of all the pearl oysters’ while diving in Watson’s Bay. Pearlie informs George that (like Andersen’s little mermaid) she is ‘tired of being a Mermaid, and if a Human fell in love with her she would not be a Sea Fairy any more’ (84). These early examples of fairy tale migrations mimic those described by Elwyn Jenkins in South African tales of the same period, in which ‘European fairy figures (flower fairies, goblins, elves, pixies, and so on) appear to cute little South African children and have adventures with typically African creatures in the local landscape’ (277). As Do Rozario notes, the preponderance of these tales in the literature of the time ‘highlights a failure to either create or capture the popular colonial imagination with alternatives that were independent of the “Mother Country”’ (15). Instead, these early tales of migrated goblins, pixies, elves, and mermaids often imperfectly or awkwardly transpose European magical figures into a culture and landscape in which their links to traditional narratives about European experiences of family, class, landscape, and power betray them as both out of place and out of time. Mermaids who live in grand palaces somewhere in Watson’s Bay, or pixies who need help contracting a marriage between a Prince and a Princess, are awkwardly incongruous figures in tales that also feature migrant workers, wharfies, opal miners, and children crippled by polio.

Non-Magical Tales Finally, many early collections of fairy tales include stories with very little in them that mimics the fairy tale traditions of Europe, but perhaps echoes some folkloric narratives. These are realist narratives about young Australian children with only light touches of magic which functions, most often, as a sop to the tragedy of early or sudden death, extreme poverty, serious illness, or disability. English’s ‘Flowers of the Spirit: Little Sunshine,’ for example, tells the story of the narrator’s visit to the Darling Downs at Christmas in 1900, and of meeting Gymea who, despite having her leg amputated after getting lost in the bush, is a cheerful and pretty young child. The tale ostensibly focuses on Gymea’s life between the ages of nine (when she loses the leg) and fourteen (when she dies of an unnamed cause, but not before suffering through a bout of ‘influenza, which later developed into pneumonia’ [60]), but its primary focus is on the family’s resilience in the face of a series of droughts and storms, relieved by the occasional ‘good harvest … to make up for the losses’ (60). Similarly, English’s ‘Sally Geranium’ focuses on the story of a young girl and her family living ‘in the slums of Surry Hills’ (46). The tale is something of a ‘rise’ tale, in which Sally and her family eventually move to ‘a nice little cottage at Newtown with a little garden’ (48) after Sally’s mother gets work doing washing for the hospital, though not before Sally is knocked down by ‘a runaway horse’ (47) and taken, unconscious, to the hospital. These tales are similar in some ways to a vein of folkloric narratives that are rooted in a particular time and place, and describe the everyday lives of peasant or working-class people. Where magic or the supernatural appears in these tales, it is largely either religious or similarly moral: magical figures appear to the pathetic or dying young figures in the tales to offer comfort either to the children themselves, or to their families. In this way, the tales echo the pathos of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Match Girl’ (1845), the tale of a poor girl who freezes to death on New Year’s Eve, but whose death is figured as something of a miracle in which the girl and her 378

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dead grandmother ‘flew in brightness and joy above the earth, very, very high. And there was no cold, no hunger, no fear. They were with God!’ (249).

Contemporary Australian Fairy Tales In adult fiction publishing, a range of Australian writers (mostly women) have continued to work within or around the fairy tale tradition. Their participation in Bacchilega’s ‘fairy tale web’ (Fairy Tales Transformed? 16–30) has partly echoed the interventions of other white Western writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in drawing on fairy tale traditions in both postcolonial and other contexts. In particular, the field of adult fairy tale literature has been dominated, in the late twentieth century, by a range of feminist and queer interventions in, and renovations of, fairy tale narratives, as well as an emerging body of critical engagements with fairy tale representations of issues around race, ethnicity, and ability. Unlike the early colonial collections of tales, which largely feature short ‘fictional’ works, contemporary fairy tale publications arise across a range of forms and genres, including short stories and short story collections, novels, and memoirs. They are usually single-author works that echo the literary fairy tale practices of writers like Andersen, Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, and Oscar Wilde, rather than the so-called oral storytelling practices that dominated colonial-era publishing.1 Contemporary Australian fairy tale publications are rarely, if ever, the result of attempts to collect, translate, edit, and publish pre-existing (oral) folklore. Instead, these tales are usually written and published in ways that emphasise an individual’s creativity in refiguring or renovating existing narrative traditions, and their authorial function as the originator of the resulting works. In relation to colonial Australian fairy tales, contemporary publications offer a range of responses to the challenge of how best to incorporate fairy tale and folklore traditions into a contemporary Australian literature. The first of these is a definitive rejection of any attempts to imagine a white cultural heritage that predates either Indigenous occupation of the land, or European exploration and invasion. Narratives such as those by Cook and Westbury, which imagined a centuries-old kingdom of fairies, have fallen out of favour with Australian writers and readers. The second, related, response is an increased emphasis on the uniqueness of Australian Indigenous narrative traditions. This includes an increased awareness of the fact that Australian Indigenous narratives emerge out of and express the cultural heritage of a diverse range of Indigenous peoples and are a living body of knowledge and narrative. It is also now widely understood within the field of fairy tale studies that Australian Indigenous narratives (as with many other non-European narrative traditions) do not often fit neatly – if at all – within a paradigm that understands folk narratives as necessarily secular, fictional, pedagogic, compact, and so on. As a consequence of these and many other shifts in the way that white (post)colonial editors, translators, collectors, and others understand their relationship to Indigenous narratives, it is now relatively uncommon to see Indigenous narratives, particularly those collected, translated, or ‘written’ by non-Indigenous people, included in fairy tale collections or anthologies. Instead, increases in Indigenous people’s access to, and control of, editing and publication of their own cultural materials – if and when that is appropriate – are increasingly undertaken by Indigenous people in ways that reflect and honour Indigenous storytelling traditions and the living cultures within which they operate. Many Australian (women) writers share an interest in stories that use European settings, and European folklore and fairy tales, to explore issues of gender and class. Danielle Wood describes works that are retold in ‘faraway or fantasy settings’ as one of ‘two primary modes of interacting with fairy tales’ in Australian literary culture (‘Renegotiating’ 384). These narratives are largely informed by, and extend, the feminist renovation of the fairy tale in English led by American and British writers in the late twentieth century, such as Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and Jeanette Winterson. Contemporary Australian works in this vein include novels and short story collections by Kate Forsyth (Bitter Greens [2012], The Wild Girl [2013], The Beast’s 379

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Garden[2015]), Angela Slatter (The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings [2014], Sourdough and Other Stories [2010]), Margo Lanagan (Sea Hearts [2012], Tender Morsels [2008]), and Hannah Kent (The Good People [2016]). Most of these works are either explicitly feminist, or strongly focus on using fairy tale narratives and tropes to revisit representations of women in fairy tales and reframe (largely heterosexual) gender relations. A relatively small, but significant, number of contemporary Australian fairy tale works extend on the tradition of using fairy tales to explore the theme of migration, often through the same trope as that used in many earlier Australian fairy tales: the migrant fairy tale creature. Slatter’s ‘Finnegan’s Field’ (2016), for example, explores the violent tension between its contemporary Australian characters, and the malevolence of a migrant fairy creature who ‘hadn’t belonged in the country where she and her children were born.’ As the narrative unfolds, the conflict between the migrant fairy (Mr Underhill) and the main character strongly reflects the tensions felt by migrants between holding to the traditions of the ‘Mother Country’ and forging new, more vital, and sustainable traditions within Australia. Angela Rega’s short story ‘The Bush Bride of Badgery Hollow’ (2014) uses the animal bride/bridegroom trope to explore issues of migrant relations with Indigenous fauna and people. The narrative is set during the colonial era and makes explicit links between the male protagonist’s desire to conquer and possess a bush bride, and the desire of white colonials to conquer and possess Australia. At the same time, the story suggests that women, including white women, are more connected to Indigenous people, laws, and landscape. Millicent not only knows how to capture the bush bride but is aware of ‘the law of this sacred ground,’ while Eudora, unlike Midge, ‘understood the love of the wild bush woman … [who] hadn’t been hers to keep.’ Krissy Kneen’s The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen (2020), a work that combines memoir and fairy tale, explores the intersection of Kneen’s family’s fairy tale and folklore traditions across a range of cultures, continents, and contexts. In some ways, the work reflects the ongoing tradition of Australian migrant writers exploring the intersections of their cultural heritage/s and their contemporary Australian experiences: at the same time, the work gestures towards a more complex interrogation of the ways that fairy tales and folklore (as well as other storytelling practices and processes) create, pervert, and sometimes obstruct personal and cultural meaning-making processes. Perhaps due to a sense of unease around the colonialist impulses of early Australian fairy tales, in which European social, cultural, and aesthetic traditions were laid over the existing landscape and culture, there are relatively few contemporary Australian fairy tale works set in Australia.2 Twentieth-century works in this vein that overlap with the feminist revisionist project of the late twentieth century include Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman (1992), as well as many of Dorothy Hewett’s early poems, particularly those collected in Rapunzel in Suburbia (1975).3 Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus (1998), with its explicit exploration of the colonialist, imperialist, and patriarchal impulses of the father-figure in relation both to the landscape and flora of Australia, and to his daughter, contrasts with the more embedded and relational approach of the suitor/botanist Mr Cave. Wood’s Mothers Grimm (2014) combines the focus on women’s lives and narratives of many other white Australian women working in the field, with an exploration of particularly Australian social, geographic, and political landscapes. Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) is perhaps the most thrilling work in the field; set in a future Australia that has been fundamentally altered by climate change, the narrative draws on elements of both Indigenous and European storytelling traditions, including a range of traditional fairy tale figures and tropes shown in sometimes violent, sometimes heartbreaking collision with Aboriginal history and legends. Wright’s book is unique in extending its exploration of the ways that fairy tale narratives both are and can be interlaced with Indigenous traditional narratives, and contemporary Australian experiences of racism, class division, and ability (Oblivia, the main character of the narrative, is mute). This contributes to the creation of a contemporary fairy tale literature that not only overcomes the problematic colonialism of earlier fairy tale publications but offers a vision of a vital and truly Australian fairy 380

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tale mode. Rather than attempting to neatly ‘decolonise’ Australian fairy tale literature, Wright’s work wrestles with the colonialism of earlier fairy tale writing, collecting, translating, and publishing practices, and their impact on Australian identity, nation-making, history, and literature. In this sense, it is a powerful example of what Nathani described as a ‘transcultural text’ (qtd in Haase 30): a fairy tale text that is more than the sum of its diverse cultural parts.

Conclusion In an early twenty-first-century text on the lives and work of the Brothers Grimm, noted fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar described fairy tales as: … perpetually appropriated, adapted, revised and rescripted … a powerful form of cultural currency, widely recognised and constantly circulating in ways that are sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure … they function as robust nomadic carriers of social practices and cultural values. (xv) Within the Australian context, the appropriation, revision, and renovation of fairy tales offers a fascinating insight into the ways that our (post)colonial history and culture is reflected and created in our literature. Early publications show the ways in which imported European ideas about fairy tales and folklore impacted on early Australian fairy tale publishing, both in terms of appropriating Indigenous stories for inclusion in fairy tale collections, and the ways in which those stories were edited and framed for a white Australian, and international, readership. Early efforts to create a uniquely Australian fairy tale tradition, within a white colonial model, are also reflected in early works by writers such as Cook, Sister Agnes, and Ethel English, with their imported fairy tale landscapes, motifs, and characters pasted into an Australian cultural landscape. Experiences of migration are a persistent thread in Australian fairy tale literature: from early works featuring migrant pixies and goblins, to contemporary works that explore in more complex ways the experiences of white Australians in attempting to reconcile their non-Australian cultural heritages and contemporary Australian lives. Finally, contemporary Australian fairy tale writing is dominated by works that follow on from the feminist renovation of the literary fairy tale: tales that examine issues of gender and sexuality historically and in the present through the lens of fairy tale narratives. Wright’s The Swan Book stands apart from all of these trends in being, perhaps, the only work that fully embodies the possibilities of a transcultural, ‘post’ colonial work. While contemporary Australian fairy tale writers, on the whole, focus largely on issues of gender, sexuality, and white migrant/colonial identity, Wright’s book offers a thrilling vision of a contemporary fairy tale literature that, rather than uncritically embracing Haase’s call for a decolonisation of fairy tale studies – ‘finding useful critical and self-reflective ways of talking about fairy tales in a global context’ (19) – engages passionately with the ongoing impact of colonial writing, editing, and publishing practices on the formation of an Australian body of narrative tropes and themes. This is a literature that is particular to the Australian context historically and in the present, and which looks forward towards a renegotiated body of works: refreshed and revitalised, raging and magical, carriers of social practices and cultural values.

Notes 1 While a distinction is often made in fairy tale studies between the oral and literary folk and fairy tale traditions, the notion that there is an oral fairy tale tradition, and that the work of scholars such as the Grimms preserved tales from this tradition is an increasingly contentious one. As Bottigheimer notes, ‘“[o]ral tradition” for the [Grimm] fairy tales … consisted for the most part of a book followed by one

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Works Cited Andersen, Hans Christian. Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales. Trans. Tiina Nunnally. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004. Bacchilega, Cristina. Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2013. ———. ‘Decolonising the Canon: Critical Challenges to Eurocentrism.’ Teverson, The Fairy Tale World. 33–43. Bail, Murray. Eucalyptus. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 1998. Bascom, William. ‘Four Functions of Folklore.’ The Study of Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965. 279–298. Benson, Stephen. Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2003. Bottigheimer, Ruth. ‘Fairy-Tale Origins, Fairy-Tale Dissemination, and Folk Narrative Theory.’ Fabula 47 (2006): 211–221. Carter, Angela. ‘Unicorn.’ British Library. May 1966. . ———. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Gollancz, 1979. Cook, James Hume. Australian Fairy Tales. Melbourne, VIC: J Howlett Ross, 1925. Do Rozario, Rebecca-Anne C. ‘Australia’s Fairy Tales Illustrated in Print: Instances of Indigeneity, Colonisation, and Suburbanisation.’ Marvels and Tales 25.1 (2011): 13–32. Dubosarsky, Ursula. The Golden Day. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2011. English, Ethel. Australian Fairy Tales. Sydney, NSW: CA Jones, 1926. Farmer, Beverley. The Seal Woman. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1992. Forsyth, Kate. Bitter Greens. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013. ———. The Beast’s Garden. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2016. ———. The Blue Rose. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2019. Golds, Cassandra. Pureheart. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013. Haase, Donald. ‘Decolonising Fairy-Tale Studies.’ Marvels and Tales 24.1 (2010): 17–38. Harries, Elizabeth W. Twice Upon A Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003. Hewett, Dorothy. ‘But Lately I Stare at the World.’ ASEA Bulletin (1969): 21. ———. ‘The Child.’ Westerly Dec. (1969): 51. ———. Rapunzel in Suburbia. Sydney, NSW: Prism, 1975. Jenkins, Elwyn. ‘Adult Agendas in Publishing South African Folktales for Children.’ Children’s Literature in Education 33.4 (2002): 269–284. Kent, Hannah. The Good People. New York: Pan Macmillan, 2016. Kneen, Krissy. The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen. Melbourne, VIC: Text, 2020. Lanagan, Margo. Tender Morsels. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2008.

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Australian Fairy Tale Practices ———. Sea Hearts. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2012. Lang, Andrew, ed. The Brown Fairy Book. London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1904. Muir, Marcie. My Bush Book: K Langloh Parker’s 1890s Story of Outback Station Life. Melbourne, VIC: Rigby, 1982. Near, Allyse. Fairytales for Wilde Girls. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013. Organ, Michael K. ‘Hume Cook and Christian Yandell’s Australian Fairy Tales 1925.’ Journal of the Book Collectors’ Society of Australia 386 (2015): 62–80. Parker, K Langloh. Australian Legendary Tales: Folklore of the Noongaburrahs as Told to the Piccanninies. Melbourne, VIC: Mullen and Slade, 1896. ———. More Australian Legendary Tales. Melbourne, VIC: Melville, Mullen and Slade, 1898. Rega, Angela. ‘The Bush Bride of Badgery Hollow.’ SQ Mag 14 (2014). . Row, Sister Agnes. Fairy Tales Told in the Bush. London: Elliot Stock, 1911. Russon, Penni. Undine. New York: Random House, 2004. ———. Breathe. New York: Random House, 2005. ———. Drift. New York: Random House, 2007. Sexton, Anne. Transformations. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. Slatter, Angela. Sourdough and Other Stories. Leyburn: Tartarus, 2010. ———. The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings. Leyburn: Tartarus, 2014. ———. ‘Finnegan’s Field.’ Tor 13 Jan. 2016. . Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003. Teverson, Andrew, ed. The Fairy Tale World. New York: Routledge, 2019. Westbury, Atha. Australian Fairy Tales. London: Ward, Lock and Co, 1897. Wood, Danielle. Mothers Grimm. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2014. ———. ‘Renegotiating “Once Upon A Time”: Fairy Tales in Contemporary Australian Writing.’ The Fairy Tale World. Ed. Andrew Teverson. New York: Routledge, 2019. 378–387. Wright, Alexis. The Swan Book. Sydney, NSW: Giramondo, 2013.

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39 SHADOWS IN PARADISE Australian Gothic Gina Wisker

Just as its sunshine coasts mask its contested haunted histories of invasion, theft, and genocide, Australian Gothic is dark, duplicitous, uncanny and dangerous. Its most famous fictional serial killer (Mick Taylor of Wolf Creek [2005]) bears the same friendly, bluff, workmanlike name as its legendary Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, and in contemporary horror tales its holiday beach towns are infiltrated by predatory transients. How Australia constructs and represents itself in literature and film is necessarily Gothic, replete with hidden, misrepresented and misunderstood histories and a consistent concern with guilt, identity, contradictions and confusions, producing a range of haunted lives, inherited and recent memories, and a hauntology of invaded or erased spaces and diverse pasts. In suggesting that ‘the Gothic itself is a narrative of trauma’ (Bruhm 268), Jessica Gildersleeve sees in the Australian Gothic ‘a sense of shame or guilt about the consequences of Australia’s colonial origins as well as the significance of its early mythologies, such as the Australian Legend’ (‘Contemporary Australian Trauma’). Contemporary Australian Gothic thus builds on and beyond trauma, becoming now ‘a site for political resistance and for social and cultural disruption’ (Gildersleeve, ‘Contemporary Australian Trauma’). In beginning to take a view of a longer history of Australian Gothic in literature and film, it is important to appreciate the mixed relationship of, on the one hand, the overwhelmingly Other landscape, climate, people and living things which the settlers invaded, and which they tried to incorporate, enculturate, relabel or destroy, and on the other, the parallel lives and ancient histories of those displaced and represented as Other, and the importance of relationship to country, which lies at the heart of Aboriginal culture. Like postcolonial Gothic, of which to some extent it is an example, Australian Gothic cuts through the received, limited, but formal versions of histories, cartographies and lives. Postcolonial Gothic carries the guilt of the histories and interpretations it denied and disturbed: dealing in haunted places, haunted lives, hidden secrets, it brings cutting clarity, a suddenly stark horror, dissolving complacency and collusion. One of its main aims is decoloniality, dealing decisively with colonial traces in knowledge generation traditions, psychological enslavement and a sense of worthlessness engineered through colonial institutions. (Wisker) A further issue for Australian Gothic is to attempt to revise the genre through a variety of lenses for both inside and outside its initially European-influenced expression, situating it and viewing it through the critical lenses of postcolonial Gothic, colonial Gothic, international Gothic, ecoGothic, tropical Gothic, Gothic tourism and feminist Gothic, among others. Many of the terrors exposed in Australian Gothic come from repression of its origins and the constriction and refusal 384

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of the Other, whether integrated, foreign, indigenous or a product of one’s own dismay and disequilibrium when immersed in difference. Beginning with some early examples of Australian Gothic and a discussion of its location, worldview, context and history, this chapter discusses these conflicts and terrors in Thea Astley’s ‘Hunting the Wild Pineapple’ (1979) and It’s Raining in Mango (1987), and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013). Without an Anne Radcliffe and a ruined European castle, the Gothic in Australia might seem impossible, although it was voraciously read in the colonies even when less in favour in Great Britain. Yet, as James Doig asserts, the necessary conditions were present: physical danger, the unknown and difference. Writers of the Gothic in and from Australia took inspiration from such experiences with bush clearing, opal hunting, characters such as tough convicts and the precarity of invader-settler lives. Colonists faced real-life horrors: ‘aggressive natives (which often prompted terrible massacres of aborigines), the unforgiving land, and of course the horrors of convict life’ (Doig, Australian Gothic 3; see also Doig, Australian Ghost Stories ix). In colonial days, apart from the reading of well-known European Gothic novels, Australian popular fiction was infused by European, and particularly British Gothic, initially with ‘Penny Bloods’ or ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ such as ‘The Blood Stained Dagger’ (1812), and Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People,’ widely considered the greatest supernatural horror story, published in the Australian Home Journal in 1904. Doig tells of a Melbourne bookseller, John P Quaine, who foraged among rubbish dumps in deserted mining claims, returning with a collection of ‘bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’ to stock his store (Australian Ghost Stories vii), providing evidence that they were widely read rather than locally produced, although some, including Jack Harkaway and His Son’s Adventures in Australia (1896), Ned Nimble among the Bushrangers of Australia (1876) and Bluecap the Bushranger or the Australian Dick Turpin (1879), had Australian locations. Frederick Sinnett’s essay, ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’ (1856), bemoans the lack of wasted castles as locations for Australian Gothic: ‘[t]here may be plenty of dilapidated buildings,’ he says, ‘but not one, the dilapidation of which is sufficiently venerable by age, to tempt the wandering footsteps of the most arrant parvenu of a ghost that ever walked by night’ (415). However, by suggesting that the country does harbour ruined buildings (remnants of failed mining endeavours, deserted towns left behind in an ongoing movement across Australia), he lays the basis for the development of a specifically Australian Gothic. As Doig’s collections indicate, these sites are haunted by lost souls, thefts and murders. Although there was little opportunity to publish in small magazines and survive on the payment in Australia, some early Australian popular fiction writers, including of ghost stories and other Gothic fictions, found opportunities to publish their tales if they left Australia and resided in the United Kingdom or Europe (as did Rosa Praed). Doig identifies a range of short stories which appeared in UK newspapers and magazines (including the Pall Mall) and in obscure publications in Australia. Some early European settler work includes John Lang’s ‘The Ghost Upon the Rail’ (1853), in which the railway crossing the land’s remote bush settings is haunted by the spectres and secrets of those it passes. Familiar settings and characters were transited into those of the settler-invader culture, so haunted houses could be reimagined as abandoned colonial homes, and isolated hermits or wanderers appear as miners, settlers, those who have abandoned their failing colonial homes or Aboriginal people who have been dispossessed from their ancestral homes. Latterly, the haunting of remote towns and nascent cities resembled that of European counterparts, while in the vast lands of Australia the predatory presence could be just as easily figured by undefinable creatures, unknown spiritual histories, events unexplained and inexplicable because of their foreignness, their otherness. The bush itself, according to Marcus Clarke, had a ‘weird melancholy’ (qtd in Doig, Australian Ghost Stories vi), rendering everything, everyone and everywhere potentially uncanny, essentially Gothic. As both creative writer of novels and short stories, and journalist and critic, Clarke early on became a voice which identifies, contributes to and characterises Australian Gothic. For Clarke, the animals, locale, everything about Australia is defamiliarised, dark, different: 385

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The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation … In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. (qtd in Doig, Australian Ghost Stories vi) Clarke, who made little money from his writing and died leaving a wife and six children destitute, produced many weird atmospheric short stories, which he called ‘Strange Tales’ and published in magazines he edited, as well as his own Gothic novel, For the Term of His Natural Life (1874). His tales are dark, drug-induced, grown from the supernatural quality he recognised in the landscape and began identifying similarities with the Gothic, asking, ‘[w]hat is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry’ (vi). Clarke, Praed, Ernest Favenc, Hume Nisbet, Price Warung, Mary Gaunt, Barbara Baynton and many others offer disturbing images of colonial existence in a land that seems to actively resist settlement and habitation, haunted by ghosts or phantoms, mythological beasts, unsettling aural effects and the horrifying residues of colonial frontier violence. Doig’s collection also includes tales of haunted places, wilder versions of English fairy glades, but also tales of the Pacific, of the wanderers, traders and those involved in the strangeness and violence of first landings. One story, ‘The Death Child’ (1905), tells of a Papua New Guinean girl stolen from her home who visits death on everyone who takes her in, abuses or employs her and is to be seen impish or wide-eyed and innocent sitting by their corpses, or the last person standing in a household, like the legendary typhoid Mary. Clarke’s short story in this collection, ‘Cannabis Indica’ (1868), betrays its influence by S.T. Coleridge’s opium-induced ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798). On the sea ‘notes, as of evil birds, were heard in the mist: and amid the continuous roar of the wind, a keener gust than usual,’ and ‘[g]igantic shadows of evil things seemed to glide up out of the mist, and to sweep onward and over them,’ while an ‘[e]lder-witch gleamed, white and ghastly, from out the waves,’ with ‘mocking whispers … beneath floods of lustrous moonlight’ (128–129). The young protagonist no longer sees anyone he knows, only ‘a skeleton Death who stood there; and who, raising a bony finger to his lips, piped a shrill whistle’ (129). Then, as the moon shifts, the sailors ‘were no longer men, but rotting corpses’ (129) and a ‘dread sense of horror weighed down his limbs, and with burning eye-balls and parched tongue he glared speechless into the sea of faces that gibbered at him on all sides’ (130). Suddenly a tall, faerie woman approaches him. He is on dry land, but she turns in an instant into the recognisable hag, the elder witch who had earlier accosted him in the city. In one weird tale, Clarke exhibits the influence of Coleridge, tales of sirens and loathly ladies from medieval romance, set in an Australian coastal city, a skeletal crew, creatures from and mists on the unpredictable sea. Doig’s collections thus represent the range of early Australian Gothic and its influences, including wild sea wanderings on the Pacific, life on the stations or in the uncharted (by Europeans) land. Praed’s ‘The Bunyip’ (1891) introduces a different Gothic favourite, the creature tale. The bunyip is a particularly Australian creature who, like the Canadian Wendigo, inhabits the unknown wilds, forests and jungles. In European Gothic he might be a fairy beast of some sort (ogre, goblin, elf, lorelei, Loch Ness monster), but in the Australian context the bunyip brings together the danger and potential of what is wild and unknown in an unfamiliar land, the ‘one respectable flesh-curdling horror of which Australia can boast’ (117). The story introduces the bunyip as a sea serpent which inhabits deep waterholes (not the sea) and makes cries like a lost child. Having engineered a rupture with the lack of distinctness and claims of veracity found in familiar ghost stories, Praed then confuses the reader with a channelling of the Aboriginal beliefs in an alternatively 386

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good or bad creature, a Debil-debil. She undercuts the trustworthiness of the taletellers by saying they have an ‘impish drollery and a love of mischief ’ (87) and enjoy fooling white listeners, that they volunteer little information but blame disappearances on the bunyip. This is clearly a creature of which there is both certainty and few distinct pieces of information. It is said to be like a large pig but resembles a crocodile in its method of dragging its prey under the water. ‘The Bunyip’ also adopts the trope of the campfire tale as a group of travelling men settle down to eat around the fire, water the bullocks, have their backs to the lagoon and tell tales; they hear a child’s cry, and fancy that the horrible monster is casting its magnetic spell upon them from the dark. But the cry is no hoax. It leads them to the lifeless body of little Nancy from the appropriately named ‘Coffin Lid’ pub, enveloped by a huge white snake which ‘uncoils itself and slips away into the scrub’ (93). They find it difficult to believe the snake has killed the child as she has been dead for some hours and so the bunyip is the obvious culprit. Praed ends this tale with an alternative definition of the bunyip from an observer who describes it as of a brownish colour, with a head something the shape of a kangaroo, and enormous mouth apparently furnished with a formidable set of teeth, long neck, covered in a shaggy mane, half under water, he would have the weight of a large bullock. (93) Although this mix makes it a very Australian kangaroo, snake or crocodile, it is hard to imagine – and so the distinctness slips away. As Melissa Edmundson shows, women’s colonial Gothic writing often tends to be critical of imperialism; thereby it is subversive and brings to the surface a troubled past of struggle and hardship that is often overlooked, or that official histories hide. Fear, anxiety, isolation, and threatening landscapes within the British Empire subvert mainstream narratives of imperial progress and expansion as they frequently create stories that refuse narrative closure and that leave characters with a greater sense of danger and uncertainty by the narrative’s end. (Edmundson 7) Australian and New Zealand Gothic writing exposes the defamiliarisation of location and difference experienced by settlers and other travellers. Historically this was a European experience in the main, particularly for settlers finding the landscape, trees, creatures, birds utterly different from those at home and struggling to recognise, name or rename them. Other locally born and often later writers, including Astley, uncover and reveal such naïve, confused versions of their homelands, emphasise the strangeness, the distance and difference felt by those settlers and invaders, those visitors, and then embrace that rich darkness of Gothicised experience where everything might seem familiar but could be dangerously other, as Gerry Turcotte points out: ‘[t]he Antipodes was a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of Britain. It was, for all intents and purposes, Gothic par excellence, the dungeon of the world’ (10). Turcotte characterises Australia as a ‘world of reversals,’ ‘darkness,’ ‘monsters,’ populated by all that is not ‘us’: a rich Gothic location. However, a postcolonial critical view more clearly identifies the history of the violence of the settlement and violence to the Aboriginal population, transported prisoners, orphans and displaced youngsters in Catholic priests’ care, all as part of the dark human history overlaid on this ancient land with its refusal to be mapped and defined. Historically, for Europeans, Australia was a place of the unknown, and so feared. The landscape, weather and people were all seen from the perspective of those who came to the land transported, as a punishment, or seeking riches. Australia could thus be a place of punishment or promise, the opposite of the ostensibly managed, structured and understood ways of Britain from which many of the settlers came, willingly or unwillingly. These settler invaders often express the richness and identity of ‘back home,’ so that their work 387

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might seem in constant tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. For this reason, the role of postcolonial Gothic figures is to destabilise complacencies, driving rifts in acceptable histories and comfortable, comforting readings of people and places. The ghost, for example, is a reminder of the undead past, its unsolved problems and unaddressed wrongs. The ghosts of the Australian Gothic remind us of a troublesome past of invasion, deportation, genocide and fantasies of ideal new beginnings in a new land often undercut by disorientation, and the sheer physical and psychological difficulties of survival. This is particularly true of Gothic works by Australian women writers. Roger Luckhurst, talking of women’s colonial and postcolonial Gothic, notes that ghosts in women’s stories are ‘signals of atrocities, marking sites of an untold violence, a traumatic past whose traces remain to attest to the lack of testimony [or] memorialising narrative’ (247; original emphasis). Both Praed and Astley, David Carter notes, imagine Queensland ‘as a place of Gothic haunting, guilty secrets, sexual repression, and violence – the other side of paradise.’ Famously, in ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit’ (1976), Astley identified Queensland as a site of difference: weird, untamed and also multicultural because of its proximity to China and other parts of Asia. It was perceived as: ‘empty’– still unsettled and uncivilised, still scarcely part of Australia despite what the outline on the map said – but viewed through fears of racial mixing and ‘contamination’ it could also seem threateningly over-crowded. Queensland officially worried about whether white men really could live in the tropics without suffering not merely individual but racial degeneration. (Carter) By utilising a female Gothic tradition that critiques the fear, trauma and violence that exist within the everyday world and transfers those anxieties to colonial regions, these narratives uncover hidden (repressed) histories of colonialism, especially women’s experience within the colonial system. Astley’s tropical, postcolonial women’s Gothic cuts through the undergrowth of fixed acceptable narratives of settling and thriving in Australia, delivering darker, disturbingly different readings and stories. This form of the Gothic offers Astley ways to simultaneously celebrate the uniqueness, toughness, resilience, creativity and bravery of the settler invaders and the Aboriginal people they exist alongside and to reveal hidden stories of genocide, denial of human rights, and everyday violence in the context of the claustrophobic mundanity of small town life. As Chloe Hooper notes, Astley has ‘a love of the fecundity and the rot of tropical life, of small communities where agoraphobia and claustrophobia commingle,’ and ‘she was one of the first novelists of her generation to write about the bloodshed of the Australian frontier.’ This emphasises Astley’s engagement with the Gothic for its abilities to balance dark and light and to expose hidden secrets behind complacencies, as well as her work’s social justice purpose (see Gildersleeve, ‘Thea Astley’s Modernism of the “Deep North”’). There is a concern with the delusions, violent crimes and dislocation of values in that cultural intersection and liminal place where indigenous people, settler invaders and travellers meet. In the tropical north Queensland of Astley’s work there is little need for the strange, monstrous beings of traditional Gothic externalised terrors and warnings when instead the landscape and tropical heat defamiliarise what seems initially recognisable and ordinary, disturbing fixed ways of seeing and being. Gothic narratives thrive on revealing a tangled complexity beneath the familiar, ancient families and ancient structures, places and people we think we know. In Astley’s tropical postcolonial Gothic figures arrive seemingly without histories, tipped into the incomprehensibly different, the ancient tropical undergrowth, the shifting boundaries and the imposition of displaced, deferred, interpretations and rules. Astley’s Gothic brings into sharp focus the contradictions of fixed behaviours and beliefs, some derived from the Catholic schooling she received herself, and the power and controls of the Catholic priests in small towns and growing cities. She tells the tales of 388

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close-knit and dysfunctional families, drunken rages in bars, deep-seated racial misunderstanding and the marginalisation of Aboriginal people beyond the edges of tenuously constructed outback versions of some idea of back home. Her schooling and then work as a journalist helped her hone her perfectly constructed and specifically nuanced language, where every choice of word, tone and tense reveals the worldview of the one described or speaking, often at odds with what they intend to perform. Astley’s control of postcolonial tropical Gothic and of language and storytelling reveals the lies, deceptions and narrative cover-ups offered by conventional histories and misrepresentations of the Other, making it a fitting form to expose the historical, mythical stuff of outback tales and ballads as constructions hiding violence and the obliteration of other peoples in the day-to-day stories through which people live their lives. In many ways her work and command of mood, myth and languages resemble that of Annie Proulx writing of Wyoming and Montana, and of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro writing of Canada, since each of these writers deals with the violence and the mundanity, the dreams and deceits, the sheer shock of the excess of weather and behaviour in small isolated settlements and extreme landscapes. All of these writers thus emphasise the toughness of isolated settlements and the erasure of the indigenous peoples. Astley’s women are often prisoners in their bodies, their contexts, their marriages (or lack of them) or all three. Like Munro’s women in Canada, Astley’s tropical women are similarly stuck in remote towns and settlements suffering the excesses and excessive restraint of their location. Astley thus Gothicises this world of constraint amid the natural world of excess – of sexual and personal structures and arrogant self-isolation amid the tropical heat. Her depiction of the defamiliarised experience of living unregulated lives in remote places echoes the hallucinatory confusions of Clarke’s ‘Cannabis Indica,’ particularly in her story ‘Hunting the Wild Pineapple.’ Here the isolated setting of a pineapple farm is, for the characters, a dinner party group, compounded by more and more booze. The excessive setting, tropical, chaotic, uncharted, is a lovely deteriorating house in the middle of somewhere, surrounded by miles of growth and overgrowth. This is a mad place, becoming madder as everyone drinks with determination and a total lack of any sense of time or structure. Everything is dysfunctional. People have come together ostensibly for a dinner party yet there is no food organised and it seems likely the only ingestion would be a series of gin and tonics, moving to other liquor as the endless supplies are mixed and drained. Time is measured in drinks: ‘the sun took three drinks to go down’ (Astley, Collected Stories 181). The house is shambolic. When food is decided on there are sounds of a complete freezer being emptied onto the floor in an addled attempt to find a lobster. The highlight of the evening is to hunt wild pineapple, the disorientation and disorder reflected in the Gothic twist of pineapple as a creature in need of hunting, its spiny outer texture unrelenting in the face of the visitors’ attempts to manage and eat it. Many of Astley’s men have a thinly masked violence and a nasty bullying nature. Pasmore, the host, is a good example of this as, drunk, hunting in the guise of drifting, he hurls the spiky pineapple at his wife whom he constantly demeans. Here ‘he tattooed her arms with spikes; the head spears spiked her chin’ (95). Underpinning relationship tensions and power struggles emerge in the controlling gestures and the alien fruit. In the disorientating narrative the failure to control the ‘wild’ pineapple, even though it is farmed, emphasises the wildness and lack of structure in these people’s lives. Astley thus depicts the centreless imagination of incredibly drunk guests in terms of the profusion of the surrounding landscape, its isolation and distance. Her landscapes are Gothic, and the weather and dominating landscape overwhelm, trap, disorientate, so that in another story, ‘Grass’ (1987), Marcus is drowning in the endless cycle of growing and managing his huge property. He is attacked, as ‘[g]rass filled his dreams, grew into swinging oceans of impossible cutting height. Seed spume became that of salt. He could drown in it … His dreams became nightmares. During dinner he swore he could hear the hiss of blades growing through the river flats’ (240). Taking in four gardening hippies helps reorient him and introduces him to ‘grass.’ Landscapes also behave in this way in the prim sounding ‘Ladies Only 389

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Need Apply’ (1979). This story represents overwhelming nature as flood water which isolates the Lady who hoped for some adventure in her new job, and instead found spite and control in the narcissistic, bullying house owner, who leaves her stranded and revels in the humiliation she puts herself through, crawling back to him through the sodden fields and the storm. In the creek she becomes a ‘white blur’ (141). In these acts she appears to seek the kind of sacrifice from which typical Gothic heroines run. Astley’s landscapes embody and dramatise the violent trapped selves of her female characters. Astley’s It’s Raining in Mango creates a richly imagined history of settlers and writers and the mediation between violent destruction and difference. It opens up a different version of history to counter the limited, acceptable, approved history. This is the case for the few observant and critical people, in this case a small family, closely following the clearing of the bush, and whose views we hear since the views of those ‘cleared’ are largely unheard, peripheral, silenced. In It’s Raining in Mango, those cutting through the bush do not have to confront their genocidal acts towards the Aborigines because they designate them as not human. Accidentally coming across a pile of dead bodies the protagonist (with her young son) reacts in horror to the dismissal ‘they’re not human.’ ‘They looked human, she persisted. “They had all your features”’ (27). Disgusted, she can refuse to be part of the cover-up, but is physically powerless to change anything. The writer at the core of It’s Raining in Mango thus comes face-to-face with the way Othering underpins a right to conduct genocide and an evil misuse of language covers it up, has to reveal this misrepresentation and face the consequences. Astley’s Gothic here uses defamiliarisation to upset complacencies and divisive truths. It is hardly surprising then that Aboriginal Gothic would develop to counter such violence. It exposes the horrors and their legacy, offering alternative versions and interpretations as does Astley, but differently, because as the Other speaking back to the white people, it can provide alternative views about the brutal past, the silencing and the voiding of Aboriginal history which ghosts the land. Aboriginal Gothic is a contested term which can be said to misread as Gothic and thus to mythologise the spiritual elements of Aboriginal culture. However, Katrin Althans argues that despite the European origins of the Gothic, ‘Aboriginal Gothic’ has been ‘appropriated, and transformed’ (277) into a unique subgenre engaging with trauma, which crosses generations (as does Toni Morrison’s African American Gothic). In this sense the Gothic merges with indigenous beliefs and expressions by Australian Aboriginal artists who morph or reverse many of the genre’s stock elements. In recognising and writing from the ‘secret-sacred’ (278) it also crosses genres and intersperses elements of traditional oral storytelling with fiction, poetry and film. This ‘reversal of traditional Gothic roles reveals the processes used for othering Aboriginal people and unmasks the Gothic nature of these processes’ (281). In this way, Australian Aboriginal artists reclaim their own cultural heritage and reject the coloniser’s construction of Aboriginal people as the demonised ‘Other.’ This can be found in Gothic texts such as Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye (2001), Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) and Raymond Gates’s ‘The Little Red Man’ (2011), as well as films including One Night the Moon (2001), Karroyul (2015) and Warwick Thornton’s interactive media, The Otherside Project (2014). Althans explains that this work defies and talks back to European worldviews and expressions, creating a counter discourse to that of the settler invaders, who brought with them European Gothic. Instead it ‘renegotiates the very meaning of the Gothic in Indigenous contexts by emphasising an Indigenous perspective’ (287). What remains as painfully alive, as Althans notes however, is the Gothic fascination with the threat to identity and the theft of land. This emerges as a guiding theme in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013). Wright’s novel is extraordinarily difficult to pin down. Calling it magical realism locks it into a very European identity, and the definition of Aboriginal Realism trickily validates a narrative which might be said to interweave science-fictional versions of an Aboriginal afro-futurism in which the past is rewritten and the future imagined as having positive potential against a context of the undermining and ignoring, if not obliterating, of indigenous and Black perspectives. The Swan Book is Wright’s 390

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third novel following her earlier Grog War (1997), which also focused on land and identity – that is, on ‘country.’ Plains of Promise (1997) and the Miles Franklin Award-winning Carpentaria (2006) are also set in the grass plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria, her ancestral country. The Swan Book is complex, interweaving words from popular and ‘high’ culture, elements from different genres, English, Aboriginal languages, French and Latin. It is, like all her work, political and humorous, satirical, mixing the literal and realistic with the metaphoric, folkloric, mythic and Gothic. Engaging an Aboriginal Gothic perspective in a future which warns of the devastation of the Anthropocene; the postcolonial, Aboriginal Gothic of The Swan Book depicts a dysfunctional, dystopian future where Aboriginal people are forced into camps and live around a toxic lake. The ersatz structures and forms of living and the lake’s toxicity are a result of both pollution and the rejection and deprivation of Aboriginal culture in the mainstream settled, white, European-affected world: ‘After all, anyone could see that foreign ghosts were not particularly harmful if you toast the innocuous cunning way that they could steal a whole country, kill your people, and still not pay those centuries worth of rent’ (Wright, The Swan Book 57). In the swamp and its ‘strange panorama of toxic waste’ (58) is an analogy of the wreck of the country and culture. Meanwhile Warren Finch comes courting: he has heard tales of the brutal behaviour of boys towards a young girl and seeks out Oblivia for his bride, in the ‘good place there called swan lake’ (94; original emphasis). The ambiguity of the notion of a lake of swans, flying swans, mute swans and the violent ballet Swan Lake (1876) run throughout. This novel offers various readings of identity, place and relationships and their metaphysical representations in terms of swans, white or black, at the end of the novel. Oblivia is seen walking, ghostly, around the old dry swamp, caught in ‘a bog story of that ghost place: a really deadly love story’ (334). In the end she is a mix of popular culture, myth, ancient story and local memory. The disruption and defamiliarisation of landscape and lifestyle is thus accompanied by a similar disruption of form and expression. In this way Wright adopts and adapts the Gothic as a means of responding to and using Aboriginal forms of storytelling in order to imagine some kind of way forward from the dystopian present. Australian Gothic has all the allure and the threat, the potential and the problematic dismay of constructions of paradise, of a fantasy otherness rendered at once potentially everyday, potentially a nightmare, and always other, even beneath the resurfacing of it as familiar. The other side of the world for Europeans suggests both dark threat and brilliant promise, the potential to hide evil and to realise fantasies. Astley’s historical work, particularly in It’s Raining in Mango, uncovers and brings to light tales of those whose forebears invaded and settled Australia historically, brutally erasing the traditional owners of the land, the Aboriginal people. Writing and storytelling are powerful, both in covering up and rendering acceptable the evil that is done, and in revealing and indicting it, setting the story straight(er). Everywhere is Gothicised, excess, fantasy, attempts at control, and traces of lands and people haunted by past violence, hidden secrets and erasures, dreams temporarily achieved or lost, a place of unknowable difference, of misinterpreted past histories and ghosts. Admitting and recreating this begins to enact that ironic, clear, nuanced social justice insight, also a major feature of the Gothic, since by destabilising cover-ups and dangerous complacencies, it might be possible to move forward acknowledging without repeating the delusional and often destructive past.

Works Cited Althans, Katrin. ‘Aboriginal Gothic.’ Twenty-First-Century Gothic. Ed. Maisha Walter and Xavier Aldana Reyes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 276–288. Astley, Thea. ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit.’ Southerly 36.3 (1976): 252–264. ———. It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album. London: Putnam, 1987. ———. Collected Stories. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1997.

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Gina Wisker Borlase, James S. ‘Bluecap the Bushranger or the Australian Dick Turpin.’ London: Hogarth House, 1879. Brett, Edwin J., ed. Jack Harkaway and His Son’s Adventures in Australia. London: Harkaway House, c. 1876. ———, Ned Nimble Amongst the Bushrangers of Australia. London: Boys of England, c. 1896. Bruhm, Steven. ‘The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.’ Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. 259–276. Carter, David. ‘Imagination: How People Have Imagined Queensland.’ Queensland Historical Atlas 3 Dec. 2010. . Clarke, Marcus. ‘Preface.’ Sea Spray and Smoke Drift. By Adam Lindsay Gordon. Melbourne, VIC: Clarson, Massina and Co, 1876. vi. ———. ‘Australian Scenery.’ Australian Tales. Melbourne, VIC: A and W Bruce, 1896. ———. For the Term of His Natural Life. 1874. Sydney, NSW: HarperCollins, 2002. Cleven, Vivienne. Her Sister’s Eye. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ Lyrical Ballads. London: J. and A. Arch, 1798. Doig, James, ed. Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction. Rockville, MD: Wildside, 2007. ———, ed. Australian Ghost Stories. London: Wordsworth, 2010. Edmundson, Melissa. Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Gates, Raymond. ‘The Little Red Man.’ Dead Red Heart: Australian Vampire Tales. Ed. Russell B. Farr. Greenwood, WA: Ticonderoga, 2011. Gildersleeve, Jessica. ‘Thea Astley’s Modernism of the “Deep North,” or On (Un)Kindness.’ Queensland Review 26.2 (2019): 245–255. ———. ‘Contemporary Australian Trauma.’ The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Ed. Clive Bloom. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 91–104. Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Hooper, Chloe. ‘Under the Rain Shadow.’ Monthly Sept. 2008. . Jolley, Elizabeth. The Well. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Lang, John. ‘The Ghost upon the Rail.’ 1853. Botany Bay, or, True Stories of the Early Days of Australia. London: William Tegg, 1859. Machen, Arthur. ‘The White People.’ Australian Home Journal. London: James Elliott, 1904. Martin, Kelrick, dir. Karroyul. Spear Point, 2015. Praed, Rosa. ‘The Bunyip.’ Coo-ee: Tales of Australian Life, by Australian Ladies. Ed. Patchett Martin. London: Griffith Farran Okeden and Welsh, 1891. ———. Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush. London: John Long, 1902. Perkins, Rachel, dir. One Night the Moon. Dendy, 2001. Scott, Kim. That Deadman Dance. Sydney, NSW: Picador, 2010. Sinnett, Frederick. ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia.’ 1856. The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature. Ed. Ken Goodwin. Houndmills: Macmillan, 2016. Thornton, Warwick. The Otherside Project. 2014. . Turcotte, Gerry. ‘Australian Gothic.’ The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998. 10–19. Wisker, Gina. ‘Gothic Postcolonialisms.’ The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Ed. Clive Bloom. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming. Wright, Alexis. Grog War: One Town’s Fight Against Alcohol. Broome, WA: Magabala, 1997. ———. Plains of Promise. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1997. ———. Carpentaria. Sydney, NSW: Giramondo, 2006. ———. The Swan Book. Sydney, NSW: Giramondo, 2013.

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40 AUSTRALIAN TELEVISION AND LITERARY CRITICISM Susan Lever

The first Australian television drama was broadcast in 1956, within a year of the first production of Ray Lawler’s play, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), that stimulated a revival of Australian stage drama. Literary critics have marked the production of the Doll as a significant turning point in the history of the national drama and accepted it and a handful of subsequent stage plays into an Australian literary canon, returning to them for analysis and reinterpretation. But television drama has struggled to gain literary status in Australia and it still presents challenges to any ongoing literary critical discussion. It confronts literary critics with a popular, ephemeral form with doubtful claims to artistic merit. Indeed, in Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the Twentieth Century John McCallum consigns the realist drama that flourished in the wake of the Doll to film and television: ‘After the early 1960s bush realism, country-town comedy-drama, slum realism and most of their related genres moved off, mostly into film and television’ (89). By the mid1960s, television adaptations of plays by Lawler, Alan Seymour, Richard Beynon, Barbara Vernon and other prominent playwrights of the stage revival had been broadcast on the ABC or on the commercial network most committed to producing drama, ATN7 Sydney/GTV9 Melbourne, engaging a much wider audience for serious drama. In television’s early years, stage drama and television drama appeared to be part of the same literary project. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Commission until 1983) led the way for the production of television drama in Australia, adapting Leslie Rees’s stage play The Sub-Editor’s Room (1956) in its first year of broadcasting and it has continued to produce drama with some claim to artistic status, particularly through adaptations of literary work and commissioning new dramas from recognised writers. Despite ATN7’s early playhouse productions, financial imperatives soon overtook artistic ambitions for the commercial networks, as Christopher Day commented in 1981: ‘Money straitjacketed commercial television’s gropings into the drama field: it quickly learned drama was a business, while the ABC could cultivate it as an art form’ (137). Nevertheless, a script is central to every television drama, no matter what its intended audience, and writers have been essential to the development of television drama – more crucial than for Australian film where directors often take the initiating creative role. Television drama depends on writers and, thereby, deserves some attention from literary critics. Yet the critical difficulties are clear. Traditional literary approaches privilege the text and a single author while the script is only one part of the creative television process, which has always been collaborative. The script, too, is often the work of a team, raising difficulties about identifying the originating artist so the literary critic’s customary pursuit of a gifted, lone creator may be frustrated. Before domestic video recording and the internet, television drama was essentially ephemeral, slipping away from view by the time critics had a chance to give it any detailed 393

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consideration, and the close textual reading given to stage drama has been impossible. Television has created its own genres demanding new critical responses and the overwhelming number of produced dramas has made it difficult to select those worthy of study. Considering the situation in 1966, John Thompson wondered whether television ‘will ever give us a literature – a literature that will stand on its own feet’ (109), and he foresaw the mammoth nature of the critical task of selecting a ‘lasting literature’ from the mass of television drama ‘so much clever writing is being churned out that scholars of the future will never be able to sort it through’ (116). In 1973, Leslie Rees had no doubt that television drama was a major strand of Australian writing, though it appealed to the masses: ‘Here as elsewhere television drama was eventually to replace radio drama as the principal mass-media theatre of the people, viewed by millions in suburban homes or in farmhouses hundreds of miles from the originating station’ (304). The first volume of Rees’s history of Australian drama, The Making of Australian Drama (1973), describes the arrival of the television play and the emergence of the serial and series forms on television in the 1960s. Rees included a select list of Australian television plays produced by the ABC in an appendix that he expanded in his second volume Australian Drama in the 1970s: A Historical and Critical Survey (1978), with a brief overview of Australian television drama to the end of the 1970s. Later histories of Australian drama have excluded consideration of television writing. While questions remain about the claims of television drama as art, few doubt its cultural importance as it reaches millions more than any of the ‘higher’ literary forms. In his chapter in the Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998) Graeme Turner sees film and television as competing with literary writing for the most prominent cultural place in defining the nation, with television less willing than film to take on the role of cultural responsibility: ‘Consequently, it has been of much less interest within Australian literary studies’ (362). He concluded, ‘[p]erhaps, sensibly, the domain of television has been left to media and cultural studies to explore’ (362). Certainly, since the rise of cultural studies in universities in the 1980s, media and cultural studies scholars have given Australian television more attention than literary critics, but this has led to a neglect of television drama as a serious element of Australian literary culture. In his High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate (1995), Peter Goodall finds this neglect to be one of the gaping absences in Australian criticism: There is very little writing about the self-consciously quality end of Australian television production in comparison with the boom in writing about popular television like soaps and quiz shows. It seems to be generally accepted from all sides that television is an intrinsically popular medium with little scope for “art” … It is surely one of the more glaring lacunae in the development of the disciplines of both Cultural Studies and English in Australia. (146) In 2003, Alan McKee asked, ‘What is Television For?’ and noted that ‘[w]hile film has a recognised canon and a tradition of close textual analysis, in the study of television the programmes have tended to vanish’ (182). He pointed to the difference between Tom O’Regan’s two landmark books, Australian National Cinema (1996) and Australian Television Culture (1993): the national film tradition called for a close reading of individual works, but television was examined as part of a culture relying on a range of political, financial and cultural services. O’Regan stressed that he was referring to ‘culture’ in its sociological, not its aesthetic, sense, as he surveyed the conditions that made television production possible, rather than considering individual programmes (Australian Television Culture xx). The distinctive national qualities of Australian film and television preoccupied academic writers in the last years of the twentieth century, and television also presents challenges on these grounds. Australian television has shown overwhelming amounts of British and A merican television material, particularly dramas, with a long-term, almost continuous, battle for mandated Australian content to force commercial networks to make Australian drama. As a result, 394

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Australian programmes have been compared constantly to those from these more populous English-speaking countries – Australian television is often seen as derivative or merely mimicking British or American shows. At the same time, television drama has been a constantly evolving form as changes to technology, financial economies and, most of all, popular taste have pushed it to constantly reinvent popular genres, such as the situation comedy or the murder mystery. The single play, mimicking stage drama, and the miniseries novel adaptation that represented serious television drama in the early years of broadcasting quickly gave way to popular television series and the long-running serials. Until the 1970s most Australian television drama was produced by the ABC or by Crawford Productions for broadcast on the commercial networks. After 1973, when a points system for Australian content gave greater value to Australian drama, Grundy Productions began producing popular serials, on the model of the British soap operas. Reg Grundy, who had built his company on quiz and game shows, had no interest in creating art, and he brought the expatriate Reg Watson back from Britain to help create a series of variously successful popular serials, such as Sons and Daughters (1982–1987), The Young Doctors (1976–1983), Prisoner (1979–1986) and Neighbours (1985–present), all produced on low budgets at high speed to meet the demands of broadcast each weeknight. By the 1980s, these unashamedly popular series had become the most famous Australian contribution to international television drama, reinforcing the popular nature of local drama and placing it even further beyond serious attention as ‘art.’ Nevertheless, discussion of Australian ‘soap opera’ has become one of the main strands of academic interest in television, partly because of its international popularity, partly because of its distinctive Australian elements. Neighbours, Prisoner, A Country Practice (1981–1994), and the historical series The Sullivans (1976– 1983) and Against the Wind (1978) have attracted scholarly attention by a range of critics. In negotiating the sheer number of Australian television drama productions, Moran has been heroic. Moran’s Guide to Australian TV Series (1993) meticulously describes each series production from 1956 to 1993, with credits for main casts, producers, writers and broadcast dates. It incorporates information from Moran’s earlier publications on Australian television: Making a TV Series: The Bellamy Project (1982), Images and Industry: Television Drama Production in Australia (1985), and with John Tulloch, Country Practice: Quality Soap and Australian Television Drama Series 1956–1981 (1986). In his Guide, Moran posited six stages for the development of Australian television: its ‘prehistory’ of planning and devising structures for it; the beginning of broadcasting from 1956 to 1964; a consolidation period from 1964 to 1975 that introduced quota and points systems for Australian content and saw the emergence of popular Australian dramas such a Crawford Productions’ Homicide; ‘The Golden Years of Drama’ from 1976 to 1986 with colour transmission and cinematic telemovies and miniseries making drama a ‘textually worthy object’; the period after the 1987 economic recession with the decline of in-house drama production by the ABC and commercial networks and the rise of international production partnerships; and, finally, speculation about the future beyond 2000 when satellite and other technology foreshadowed the rise of pay TV in Australia. Moran defined television drama in terms of scripted drama, recognising that it began with a writer or writers, like other literary work. His Guide’s entries on individual dramas, like the listings in Scott Murray’s more narrowly focused Australia on the Small Screen 1970–1995: The Complete Guide to Telefeatures and Miniseries (1996), provide the kind of information now available on internet websites such as Classic Australian Television (https://www.classicaustraliantv.com/) which services a kind of television nostalgia with clips, descriptions and background information on past television dramas. Moran’s earlier books, on the Grundy detective series Bellamy (1981), and the popular serial A Country Practice, represent rare book-length examinations of individual Australian television drama series, the kind of critical support found for many British and American shows. A Country Practice: Quality Soap directly addressed the possibility that a popular television drama might have literary qualities, examining the interaction between writers and others involved in creating the 395

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serial (actors, directors) and the way an entertaining and long-running drama might aspire to some complexity and seriousness of purpose. In the second part of his Images and Industry Moran gave extended readings of examples from the major television drama genres to date: crime and the police (Bellamy, Homicide [1964–1977], Cop Shop [1977–1984]), sitcom (My Name’s McGooley, What’s Yours? [1966–1968], Kingswood Country [1980–1984], Home Sweet Home [1980–1982]), serials (A Country Practice, Sons and Daughters) and historical miniseries (Against the Wind, 1915 [1982]). In this way, Moran established ways to approach the major television genres and gave attention to the achievements of television drama up to the 1990s. In 1991, Elizabeth Jacka published a brief history of drama production on the ABC from 1975 to 1990 that complements Moran’s work. She also included a broad chronology of changes, noting that the ABC’s Television Drama Department was not founded until 1965, with a period of consolidation and success from 1968 until 1975 when the Whitlam and subsequent governments began cutting ABC funding. She notes a ‘mild resurgence’ (22) from 1978 to 1982, followed by a decline in production from 1982 to 1986 and the development of co-production strategies since then. Jacka describes the influence of the various directors of the ABC Drama Department and discusses debates within the organisation about the balance between popular and more culturally serious production. Although her book is not literary criticism, she devotes 20 pages to discussing the ‘key productions’ (71–90) between 1971 and 1989 giving detailed attention to 39 drama programmes. The selected dramas serve as a kind of canon of ABC productions over the period, some of the high-quality dramas that deserve long-term attention. Scottish-born Alan McKee overcame the difficulties of a new arrival approaching the mass of past Australian television material by asking viewers about their strongest television memories. His Australian Television: A Genealogy of Great Moments (2001) has been called the first history of Australian television to focus on the programmes rather than the production context. Though his book is full of insights into a range of notorious and amusing moments on Australian television, drama makes up less than half of it, with attention to early detective series Homicide, the serials Number 96 (1972–1977), The Sullivans, Prisoner, A Country Practice, Return to Eden (1983–1986) and Neighbours, and the satire of television current affairs, Frontline (1994–1997). These were the dramas most alive in popular memory, and McKee brought an outsider’s sharp analysis to them. While considered criticism of the ‘literary’ elements of television has been sparse, there has, of course, been a continuing response to television drama in the regular newspaper and magazine coverage of television. Two weekly magazines, TV Week (1957–present) and TV Times (1958–1980, when it merged with TV Week), have published commentary on television alongside programme guides, mainly as promotional material for television shows. The major newspapers have published regular columns by television critics, but no local critics have achieved the prominence of the expatriate Clive James, whose television criticism has been collected in several books. The only local example is Morris Gleitzman’s Just Looking (1992), a collection of some of his columns for the Sydney Morning Herald from 1987 to 1992. In this book Gleitzman takes television shows as the starting point for amusing riffs, only occasionally touching on local drama, for example, praising the lack of gentility in Prisoner, assessing the attractions of the first episodes of the serial E Street (1989–1993) or mocking the self-conscious cinematic quality of the historical miniseries Captain James Cook RN (1987). His columns offer the immediate reactions of an alert, perceptive audience member as he ranges over the full offering of television programming, including overseas productions. Gleitzman’s and James’s commentaries exemplify the tone of much newspaper criticism of television where gentle mockery suggests that television should never be taken too seriously. Such columns can offer some astute as well as amusing insights into television dramas and, at least, record an individual’s reactions to it. Marion Macdonald, who wrote television columns for the Sydney 396

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Morning Herald and the Times on Sunday for most of the 1980s, Ian Warden whose ‘I Saw’ column in the Canberra Times was published for decades and Michael Idato who currently writes for the Sydney Morning Herald are among many who have written weekly columns reviewing the week’s television shows (never exclusively drama) for Australian newspapers, though the recent tendency is for ‘preview’ rather than ‘review’ of television programmes, possibly a shift to more promotional writing. Graeme Blundell has written substantial weekly columns in the weekend Australian since 2004, and Jane Goodall occasionally writes extended responses to television in the online journal Inside Story. Lauren Carroll Harris in the Guardian and, often with Craig Mathieson, on ABC Radio National’s Screen Show also offers brief assessments of new dramas. These critics write about the full range of new television programmes, including documentaries, comedy and reality television, and none restrict themselves to Australian productions, so their coverage of Australian television drama is necessarily fleeting. Despite their importance in providing immediate critical responses to new work, in the long run these critical columns appear to be even more ephemeral than the television they discuss, rapidly disappearing from memory. In the absence of any full history of Australian television drama (as opposed to histories of television programmes or production systems, or listings with brief descriptions of dramas) more detailed criticism may be found in a range of academic journals, occasional chapters in collected essays on television or books that cover a range of other screen elements. Continuum’s special issue on ‘Australian Screen Comedy’ (1996) includes McKie and Hilaire Natt’s discussion of ABC sitcoms. Susan Lever compares Australian variety comedy and dramatic comedy, including Mother and Son (1984–1994) and Kath and Kim (2002–2007) in Frances de Groen and Peter Kirkpatrick’s Serious Frolic (2009); Neil Rattigan analyses the humour of Kingswood Country in his Airy Persiflage (2015). Brian McFarlane includes discussion of ABC television’s adaptations of Martin Boyd’s novels, Lucinda Brayford (1980) and Outbreak of Love (1981), in his Words and Images (1983); Belinda Smaill discusses The Cowra Breakout (1985) in James Bennett and Rebecca Beirne’s collection on film and television histories (2011). Tulloch and Turner’s Australian Television: Programs, Pleasures and Politics (1989) includes Ann Curthoys and John Docker on Prisoner and Kate Bowles on soap opera. Bowles and Turnbull’s Tomorrow Never Knows (1994) considers Australian soap opera while Turner and Stuart Cunningham’s The Australian TV Book (2000) includes chapters on Australian soap opera (Bowles) and the nature of primetime drama (McKee). Turnbull cites Homicide and the more recent Underbelly series (2008–2013) as examples of cultural hybridity in her examination of the international television crime genre. In 2007 the Journal of Australian Cultural History published a special issue on television, edited by Jacka and titled ‘Australian Television History.’ This emerged from a conference held at the University of Technology, Sydney. The issue includes articles on the Crawford crime shows, ABC comedy, an early dramatisation of Aboriginal life called Alcheringa (1962) and Ailsa McPherson’s vivid recollections of drama production at ATN7 in the 1960s. Occasional articles on television drama appear in journals such as Metro, Screen Education, Cinema Papers, Continuum and the M/C Journal. Metro and Screen Education have supported the teaching of media in Australian schools by publishing analyses of shows such as Frontline that have appeared on the high school curriculum. In the absence of any more exalted sources, study guides provide analysis and helpful background to the set texts. Over the years, Currency Press has published screenplays of selected television dramas, including Women of the Sun (1981), Scales of Justice (1983), Bastard Boys (2007), Grass Roots (2000–2003) and The Circuit (2007–2010). In these dispersed considerations, attention has been focused on a small group of television programmes, usually on popular series or serials with a strong national element (such as Homicide, The Sullivans, Prisoner or local sitcoms) or those included in teaching curricula for their perspectives on other elements than the literary (Frontline for its representation of the media). In this context, screenwriters themselves have often provided the strongest critical insights into their work. In Top 397

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Shelf 1: Reading and Writing the Best in Australian TV Drama (2001), Greg Haddrick gives a detailed account of the processes for writing serial and series drama in Australia, then goes on to analyse in detail individual scripts for Home and Away (1988–present), Breakers (1998–1999), Good Guys, Bad Guys (1997–1998), Blue Heelers (1994–2006) and Wildside (1997–1999); Top Shelf 2: Five Outstanding Television Screenplays (2001) makes these screenplays available for readers. Haddrick’s books are directed to aspiring television writers but they represent some of the most sustained literary analysis of Australian television drama to date. Linda Aronson’s Television Writing: The Ground Rules of Series, Serials and Sitcom (2000) is also directed at would-be scriptwriters, and includes comments by other screenwriters, such as Caroline Stanton on Blue Heelers. Occasional interviews and articles in magazines such as the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Storyline allow writers to give interesting perspectives on their work and provide some background for a literary approach – for example, Kelly Lefever’s description of the collaborative process of writing The Circuit. Informed literary criticism needs access to scripts and some clips of productions, some critical agreement about which dramas are worthy of study, and an understanding of the experience of writers as part of production teams. Without a reliable literary history, scriptwriters may prove the key to managing the vast backlist of our television drama. Any proposed list of ‘quality’ Australian television drama would no doubt include series and literary adaptations such as Stormy Petrel (1960), You Can’t See ’Round Corners (1967), Certain Women (1973–1976), Marion (1974), Power Without Glory (1976), Ride on Stranger (1979), Against the Wind, Women of the Sun, The Damnation of Harvey McHugh (1994), The Last Outlaw (1980), Mother and Son, Scales of Justice, Captain James Cook RN, The Dismissal (1983), The Last Bastion (1984), Bastard Boys, Brides of Christ (1991), Grass Roots, Phoenix (1992–1993), Janus (1994–1995), Blue Murder (2003–2009) and Underbelly. It would include telemovies such as Displaced Persons (1985), Two Friends (1986), Joh’s Jury (1993) and innovative series like Good Guys Bad Guys, Mercury (1996), The Circuit, Redfern Now (2012) and Underbelly. Popular domestic serials such as A Country Practice, Flying Doctors, GP (1989–1996), Blue Heelers, SeaChange (1998–2000, 2019–present), All Saints (1998–2009), The Secret Life of Us (2001–2005), Offspring (2010–2017) and Packed to the Rafters (2008–2013) would call for attention, as would the whole tradition of Australian sitcom from Barley Charlie (1964) and My Name’s McGooley, What’s Yours? through to Rake (2010–2018) and Rosehaven (2016–present). Even this selection represents a demanding viewing task. It is perhaps unsurprising that the same writers’ names recur in the credits for these dramas over the years: Richard Lane, Tony Morphett, Cliff Green, Peter Yeldham, Howard Griffiths, Sonia Borg, Ian Jones and Bronwyn Binns, Anne Brooksbank, John Misto, Mac Gudgeon, Robert Caswell, Eleanor Witcombe, David Williamson, Sue Smith, Ian David, Graeme Koetsveld, Kelly Lefever, Debra Oswald are among the 200 or so Australian writers responsible for much of the outstanding dramatic writing on television. Alan Hopgood, Ralph Petersen, Hugh Stuckey, Geoffrey Atherden, Gary Reilly and Tony Sattler, Andrew Knight, Deb Cox and John Clarke are behind much comedy drama. A striking number of popular serials and series have Roger Simpson, Bevan Lee or Greg Haddrick at the centre of their writing teams. As one approach to understanding the history of Australian television drama, I have interviewed a range of writers, some for the Australian Writers’ Guild oral history. These interviews and their transcripts can be accessed through the National Film and Sound Archive and the National Film Radio and Television School library. In interviews, many television dramatists reveal a self-awareness about their work that may not be evident to critics. Morphett acknowledges that narrative is the important driver in television drama and likens the television series to the serial novels of the nineteenth century. Lee agrees that the long-form television serial continues the tradition of Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, though he insists that television drama is not the same as the literary novel and needs to be judged in its own terms. This is the challenge for literary critics approaching television 398

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drama – to understand the popular attractions of plot and melodrama while appreciating the depth of complexity and characterisation, the irony and mix of humour and pathos that a television drama may achieve within the confines of a rigid structure and financial constraints. In the new century, Australians became aware of television dramas produced by US pay-TV networks led by the success of HBO productions. Dramas such as the Six Feet Under (2001–2005), The West Wing (1999–2006), The Wire (2002–2008), Deadwood (2004–2006) and Mad Men (2007– 2015) demonstrated that it was possible to make television drama that outshone most Hollywood films in wit and complexity. After decades as largely invisible creators, some American screenwriters suddenly became household names. As a result, there has been a surge in scholarly publication about the work of these writers, with Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised (2013) declaring that The Wire is the Great American Novel for television, with its writers, David Simon and Ed Burns, consciously setting out to write a novel for television rather than a series (71). Enthusiasm for these American dramas has grown in Australia, with many literary critics turning their attention to their favourite shows, as well as the new Danish and British dramas written in response. James McNamara has written about this new Golden Age of Television Drama and the shifts in comedy writing as a result of the streaming of television drama. It remains to be seen whether Australian drama will share in this new Golden Age. Some Australian writers have travelled to the United States to participate in it, just as they travelled to Britain in the 1960s to become part of the new British television drama. One Australian success has been Lee’s A Place to Call Home which was taken up by the Foxtel network in 2016 – and Lee’s name appears on the credits as its ‘Creator.’ With a film industry still struggling for audiences, it is to be hoped that television may, as it did in the 1980s, keep Australian screen creativity alive. Internationally, this new kind of ‘novel for television’ has become accepted as a major art form, which somehow bridges the demands of the popular and the aesthetic. The challenge to Australian literary critics is to find ways to understand and appreciate this art form. The materials for the study of Australian television drama are growing, with early ABC scripts accessible from the National Archives of Australia, collections of commercial material at NFSA and Melbourne’s Museum of the Moving Image, and Austlit extending its bibliographical indexing to include screenwriters and scripts in Screenlit. There is much work for critics to do.

Works Cited Aronson, Linda. Television Writing: The Ground Rules of Series, Serials and Sitcom. North Ryde, NSW: AFTRS, 2000. Bowles, Kate, and Sue Turnbull, ed. Tomorrow Never Knows: Soap on Australian Television. South Melbourne, VIC: AFI, 1994. Curthoys, Ann, and John Docker. ‘In Praise of Prisoner.’ Tulloch and Turner, Australian Television. 52–71. Day, Christopher. ‘Drama.’ Australian TV: The First 25 Years. Ed. Peter Beilby. Melbourne, VIC: Nelson/ Cinema Papers, 1981. Gleitzman, Morris. On Television: Just Looking. Sydney, NSW: Pan Macmillan, 1992. 54–56. Goodall, Peter. High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1995. Haddrick, Greg. Top Shelf 1: Reading and Writing the Best in Australian TV Drama. Sydney, NSW: Currency/ AFTRS, 2001. ———, ed. Top Shelf 2: Five Outstanding Television Screenplays. Sydney, NSW: Currency/AFTRS, 2001. Jacka, Elizabeth. The ABC of Drama 1975–1990. North Ryde, NSW: AFTRS, 1991. ———, ed. Australian Television History. Perth, WA: API, 2007. Lefever, Kelly. ‘Culture Shocks.’ Storyline 28 (2010): 30–37. Lever, Susan. ‘High Culture in the Popular Medium: Australian Writing for Television, with Reference to the Work of Pat Flower and Louis Nowra.’ Journal of Australian Studies 58 (1998):127–133. ———. ‘“Lookatmoiye! Lookatmoiye!” Australian Situation Comedy and Beyond.’ Serious Frolic: Essays on Australian Humour. Ed. Frances de Groen and Peter Kirkpatrick. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009. 221–238.

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Susan Lever McCallum, John. Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the Twentieth Century. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 2009. McFarlane, Brian. Words and Images: Australian Novels into Film. Richmond, VIC: Heinemann/Cinema Papers, 1983. McKee, Alan. Australian Television: A Genealogy of Great Moments. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. ———. ‘What is Television For?’ Quality Popular Television. Ed. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons. London: British Film Institute, 2003. 181–193. McKie, David, and Hilaire Natt. ‘An ABC of Australian Sitcoms: British Influences, Middle Class Mores and Boutique Quality.’ Continuum 10.2 (1996): 141–156. McNamara, James. ‘The Golden Age of Television?’ Australian Book Review 370 (2015). . Moran, Albert. Making a TV Series: The Bellamy Project. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 1982. ———. Images and Industry: Television Drama Production in Australia. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 1985. ———. Moran’s Guide to Australian TV Series. North Ryde, NSW: AFTRS, 1993. Murray, Scott. Australia on the Small Screen: 1970–1995. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. O’Regan, Tom. Australian Television Culture. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993. ———. Australian National Cinema. London: Routledge, 1996. Rattigan, Neil. Airy Persiflage: Occasional Thoughts on Film, Television and Culture. Armidale, NSW: Fastnet, 2015. Rees, Leslie. The Making of Australian Drama: A Historical and Critical Survey from the 1830s to the 1970s. Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1973. ———. Australian Drama in the 1970s: A Historical and Critical Survey. Sydney, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1978. Sepinwall, Alan. The Revolution was Televised. New York: Touchstone, 2013. Smaill, Belinda. ‘The Cowra Breakout.’ Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand. Ed. James E Bennett and Rebecca Beirne. London: IB Taurus, 2012. 133–137. Thompson, John. ‘Broadcasting and Australian Literature.’ Literary Australia. Ed. Clement Semmler and Derek Whitelock. Melbourne, VIC: Cheshire, 1966. 89–116. Tulloch, John, and Albert Moran. A Country Practice: ‘Quality Soap.’ Sydney, NSW: Currency, 1986. Tulloch, John, and Graeme Turner, ed. Australian Television: Programs, Pleasures and Politics. Sydney, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1989. Turnbull, Sue. The TV Crime Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. Turner, Graeme. ‘Film, Television and Literature: Competing for the Nation.’ The Oxford History of Australian Literature. Ed. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 348–363. Turner, Graeme, and Stuart Cunningham ed. The Australian TV Book. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 2000.

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41 SCREEN ADAPTATION AND AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE Karina Aveyard

Since the earliest days of cinema, literature has been a popular source of inspiration for fi lmmakers, and Australian literary texts have been no exception. Over the past century more than 60 Australian novels have been adapted for the big screen along with numerous poems, short stories and comics. A significant number of Australian-written creative works have also served as the basis for television movies and mini-series. The majority of these adapted screen productions have been made in Australia; however, a number have also been produced internationally, including some as large budget projects by major Hollywood studios. The films (and the literary texts upon which they are based) span a wide range of genres and subjects, from dramas and coming-of-age stories to action adventures and thrillers, and even a cult horror film. This chapter is divided into two sections – the first forming an annotated chronology of the history of films adapted from Australian literary texts that is expansive although not comprehensive. This is structured around the trajectory of film production rather than dates of literary publication, as some works are transferred quickly to screen while in other cases there are considerable gaps between the writing of the literary work and the production of the ‘based on’ screen version. Some films appear out of chronological sequence where there are convenient thematic connections. The second section explores some of the key debates that have emerged around the practice of adapting literary works for the screen within both literary criticism and film studies. Critically there has been an uneasy relationship between the literary work on the one hand, and its repurposing for screen-based narratives and visual representation on the other. As Linda Hutcheon observes, adaptations (of all kinds) have often been viewed as ‘minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the “original”’ (Hutcheon xiv). In relation to film and literature specifically such perspectives are bound up in hierarchies of art and taste as much as with questions of form, style, interpretation and fidelity of both original and adapted texts. This chapter offers some general observations about adaptation that are relevant to understanding its processes and possibilities. In particular, it emphasises that the process of creating an audiovisual work from a literary text is a phenomenon that cannot be adequately accounted for simply as a process of transference or replication.

Australian Literary Adaptions – 1890s to Present Early Years Cinema production and exhibition began in Australia in the late 1890s. These early films were mostly short, unedited documentaries that focused on everyday life and events in Australia at the 401

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time. By the turn of the twentieth century interest was increasingly turning to the making of fiction with popular literary works forming the inspiration for some of the best known Australian films of that period. Until the 1930s all films were silent and in black and white. The first feature with synchronised sound was released in the United States in 1927 (The Jazz Singer) and in the decade or so that followed filmmakers in Australia also transitioned into this new style of production and its expanded creative possibilities. The first Australian film to be shot and released in colour was Charles Chauvel’s Jedda (1955) (Aveyard, Moran and Veith 1–3). Early Australian filmmaking interest centred on stories that captured significant elements of early European life in the colony – the narratives of bushranging and convict life being particularly noteworthy. Rolf Boldrewood’s (the pseudonym of Thomas Alexander Browne) novel Robbery Under Arms (1882) was one of the earliest examples. Two silent film versions of the novel appeared in 1907, one made by Charles MacMahon and the other by John and Nevin Tait (who the year before had produced what is regarded as the world’s first full-length feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang) (Pike and Cooper 5–7). The wide and enduring appeal of the Robbery Under Arms story is indicated in a further four versions made since the 1907 original – two further silent versions in 1911 and 1920, a 1957 version in sound and colour made by the British Rank Organisation and starring Peter Finch, and the most recent in 1985 starring Sam Neill in a screenplay adapted by well-regarded screen writer Michael Jenkins. Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1872), the story of a convict transported to New South Wales, was the basis for three feature films. The first was also made by MacMahon and released in 1908, followed by another version in 1911 and again in 1927 (Pike and Cooper 8–9, 138–140). In 1983 For the Term of His Natural Life was further adapted as a television mini-series starring Colin Friels. While such films were very popular with audiences, they caused considerable anxiety for governments and law enforcement who believed these stories encouraged moral laxity. Between 1911 and 1912 South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria introduced legislation banning the production and screening of bushranger films. This ban remained in effect until the early 1940s, curtailing the development of what was becoming a highly successful genre (Gaunson 294). Murder mysteries were another popular genre of this period. Fergus Hume’s popular novel, The Mystery of the Hansom Cab (1896), was adapted for the screen by the Taits in 1911. It was remade in Australia in 1925 by Arthur Shirley who also appeared in the lead role, and was highly successful commercially (Pike and Cooper 14, 124–125). In the intervening period another successful film version had been made in the United Kingdom in 1915. The Mystery of the Hansom Cab has since been serialised for British radio (1958), adapted as a stage play performed in Queensland (1990) and remade as a movie for television for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) (2012). The first locally made film content for public exhibition in Australia was a series of short documentaries about the 1896 Melbourne Cup produced by Frenchman Marius Sester and local portrait photographer Henry Barnett. ( Jackson). By the 1910s several fictionalised films based on the Australian love of horse racing also began to appear. Arthur Wright’s novel, Keane of Kalgoorlie (1907), describing the racing and gambling circles of Sydney, was released as a silent film in 1911. Another two of Wright’s horse racing stories – In the Last Stride (1914) and Gambler’s Gold (1911) – were adapted for the screen in the same year (Pike and Cooper 19, 31).

Inter-war Period In the first few decades of the twentieth century Australia was one of the most prolific fi lm-producing countries in the world. However, by the mid-1910s Australian interests were becoming increasingly concentrated and many companies were amalgamated as part of the establishment of two major entertainment conglomerates, Australasian Films and Union Theatres. In the years that followed, local production began to rapidly decline, with American content increasingly favoured 402

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over local fare. Nevertheless, some feature films continued to be made. Among the most prolific producers in the period between the First and Second World Wars were Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell (also an actress), Charles Chauvel, and later Ken G Hall and Frank Thring. During this period, poetry, especially longer narrative-style works, were also inspiring films. The Sentimental Bloke (1919) drew on the series titled The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915) by CJ Dennis for characters and narratives. Considered a masterpiece of Australian cinema, this film was written and produced by local filmmaking pioneers Longford and Lyell. A second cinematic version, this time with synchronised sound, was released in 1932 and was produced by Thring from a screenplay by Dennis. Many years later another iconic Australian poem was adapted successfully for the cinema. The Man from Snowy River, by bush writer AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson, was published in 1902, and exactly 80 years later George T Miller turned it into an internationally successful commercial film of the same name. Miller combined the poem’s story of a young bushman’s heroic chase and recapture of a prized colt with the added dimensions of a love story and family conflict in the Snowy Mountains high country. Comic strip characters such as Fatty Finn found motion picture life in The Kid Stakes (1927), as did Ginger Meggs many years later in 1982. Picture book characters for children have also been reproduced for the screen, including Dorothy Wall’s iconic stories of Blinky Bill and friends (1933), which have been remade as a film on two occasions (Blinky Bill: The Mischievous Koala [1992] and Blinky Bill: The Movie [2015]), Ethel Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo (1899, adapted 1977) and Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding (1918, adapted 2000). In 1921, Longford and Lyell adapted Harrison Owen’s popular murder mystery novel, The Mount Marunga Mystery (1919), renaming it The Blue Mountains Mystery. While a considerable number of Australian literary texts had been adapted for film to this point, few had been based on books that were recently published (one notable exception being Wright’s horse-racing stories). Whether Owen wrote the story with its film potential in mind, or this was discerned quickly upon its release, is impossible to know. Modern audiences are familiar with the practice of popular books being adapted swiftly to film and it is useful to note this pattern of connection has a lengthy history. Among the most successful films of the inter-war period was a series based on Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection, a collection of short stories that Rudd had written in the late 1890s. The characters, plots and locations from Rudd’s light-hearted stories about one family’s life on a small agricultural holding, or ‘block’ (selection) formed the basis for ‘Dad and Dave.’ Longford directed the first version in 1920. A second version directed by Hall and starring Bert Bailey appeared in 1932 and went on to become one of the most popular domestic films ever produced (Pike and Cooper 158). Hall and Bailey made a further three movies based on the ‘Dad and Dave’ stories – Grandad Rudd (1935), Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938) and Dad Rudd, MP (1940). More recently, veteran English actor Leo McKern and Dame Joan Sutherland (in her only film role) starred in another adaptation titled Dad and Dave: On Our Selection (1995). However, this film was unable to replicate the box office success of the 1930s versions.

Post-Second World War During the Second World War local filmmaking declined as investment and resources were redirected towards the fighting effort. Content to fill cinema theatres could still be accessed via the United States so there was little pressure on local producers. In the immediate postwar period, feature production began again slowly and a few films were produced each year. However, the industry would never replicate the level of activity that had characterised earlier decades (Aveyard, Moran, and Vieth 3). Several adaptions of Australian novels were produced in the 1950s and 1960s, although the majority of these were made overseas. Perhaps the most well known was Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1957) directed by Hollywood legend John Huston, adapted from the 1952 403

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novel by Charles Shaw. The film starred Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in a love story set on a Pacific Island occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War. The film was shot in Trinidad and Tobago and produced for 20th Century Fox with almost no connection to Australia other than its source material. A few years earlier Henry Handel Richardson’s first novel Maurice Guest (1908) was adapted for the screen by MGM. The film was released under the title Rhapsody in 1954 and starred Elizabeth Taylor. It was styled as a popular love story more than it attempted to capture the complexity and detail of Richardson’s original work. However, production activity was not solely focused internationally, and two notable movies were made in Australia at this time, albeit both by foreign companies. The British studio Ealing established a production branch in Australia in the late 1940s and produced a small string of features until the operation was closed in the late 1950s. One of their last films in Australia was The Shiralee (1957), adapted from D’Arcy Niland’s book of the same name (1955). The film tells the story of an itinerant worker who finds himself having to take responsibility for his young daughter who joins him in his life on the road. Niland’s novel was well received and he reportedly received the handsome sum of £10,000 for the film rights within months of its release (Valentine 4). The Shiralee was also adapted as a television mini-series for Channel Seven in 1987, this time starring Bryan Brown and Noni Hazelhurst. The film adaptation of Jon Cleary’s The Sundowners was released in 1960. It was produced by Warner Bros and boasted a high-profile international cast comprising Kerr, Mitchum and Peter Ustinov. Another popular story, this film went on to success at the Australian and US box office, and was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Film. Morris West’s fictional story about the succession of a progressive Catholic Pope, The Shoes of the Fisherman, was released in 1963, and in 1968 MGM turned it into a film starring Anthony Quinn and Lawrence Olivier. In another example of a novel being perceived as well suited for adaptation, MGM acquired the rights in 1964, soon after its publication. An earlier West book, The Devil’s Advocate (1959), was also later transferred for the screen. Released under the title Des Teufels Advokat in 1977, the film was produced in English by a company based in what was then West Germany. It starred veteran British actor John Mills in the role of a dying priest sent to a small village in Italy to determine the credibility of a locally revered man being recommended for sainthood. Russell Braddon’s comic-horror novel about giant mutant bunnies, The Year of the Angry Rabbit (1964), was used as the basis for a straight horror film Night of the Lepus, released in 1972. The film version was made in the United States for MGM and starred Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh. Other notable Australian literary works adapted for high-budget international film projects include High Road to China (1983), based loosely on Jon Cleary’s 1977 novel. The film starred Tom Selleck and was produced by Hong Kong company Golden Harvest and released by Warner Brothers. In 1992 Bryce Courtenay’s popular bestseller The Power of One was used as the basis for a movie produced under the partnership between Warners and Australian company Village Roadshow. The following year Thomas Keneally’s powerful novel Schindler’s Ark (1982) was adapted as the film Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, a man who helped many Jews in Germany in the Second World War escape death by employing them in his businesses. The film was hugely successful and won Best Film and Best Director for Spielberg as well as Best Adapted Screenplay for Steven Zaillian. More recent major international productions based on Australian literary works include ML Stedman’s first novel The Light Between Oceans (2012), and The Book Thief (2013) based on Markus Zusak’s bestseller of the same name. The highly popular children’s story Mary Poppins stretches out over a series of eight books written by Australian-British writer PL Travers and published over the period 1934–1988. The books were adapted by Walt Disney into what has become a classic musical film (1964), starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. The recent Saving Mr Banks (2013) depicted the making of that 404

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film. Disney also released a sequel, Mary Poppins Returns (2018), starring Emily Blunt as Poppins. Travers’s novels were also adapted into a stage musical produced by Cameron Mackintosh which ran in London’s West End and Broadway for several years.

1970s Australian Film Revival (or New Wave) In the doldrums for much of the 1950s and 1960s, new possibilities emerged for the Australian film industry in the 1970s with the establishment of government financial support for the production (through the Australian Film Development Corporation, later the Australian Film Commission) and the launch of a dedicated film education and training institution (Australian Film, Television and Radio School) (Aveyard, Moran, and Vieth 3–4, 34, 212). The output of Australian films increased significantly as a result of these measures and this period of reawakening is often referred to as the ‘Australian film revival’ or ‘New Wave.’ One obvious source of material for the revival in production was novels and plays – popular and literary, historical, and contemporary – about Australian life and characters. One of the first films of the ‘revival’ was Wake in Fright (1971), based on Kenneth Cook’s dark psychological thriller of the same name (1961), although it should be noted this film had gone into production (financed by foreign investors) before any of the government interventions had been implemented. Widely considered a masterpiece of Australian cinema, Wake in Fright was thought to be lost until a print was found in 2004 and digitally restored. The film was directed by Canadian Ted Kotcheff, but made in Australia and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971. The film arguably retains much of the intensity of Cook’s work, skilfully using elements of colour to create the oppressive and at times menacing physical environment of the outback setting, together with a tight and singular narrative structure and editing precision to build a sense of unrelenting pressure and impending doom in the story (see Kaufman). A television mini-series based on Cook’s novel was produced for Channel Ten in 2017. A few years after the release of Wake in Fright, Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) was adapted for the screen in a groundbreaking film of the same name. Released in 1975, the film was directed by Peter Weir, who would become one of the leading creative figures of the New Wave period. In contrast to many commercial films being made at the time, Weir’s interpretation of the Lindsay story followed the traditions of European art cinema, the kind of film that was at the time relatively new in Australia. The dreamlike qualities of the novel and its ambiguous ending all lent themselves well to a film that deliberately avoided the cinematic conventions of cause and effect within the actions of the characters and the movement of the narrative (Aveyard, Moran, and Vieth 193) The adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock also represented an important counterpoint to the domination of male authorship in original works used for filmic adaptions until this time. Lindsay’s novel has since been adapted for the stage in 1997 in the United States, for radio in the UK in 2010 and as a television mini-series for Amazon Prime in 2018. Coming-of-age stories have long been a popular theme in Australian cinema, particularly in the 1970s when numerous films drew on existing literary texts for inspiration. Colin Thiele’s children’s novels were the basis for Storm Boy (1976) and Blue Fin (1978). A second Henry Handel Richardson novel, The Getting of Wisdom (1910), was adapted for the screen in 1977 and directed by Bruce Beresford. Ronald McKie’s novel (1974) was the source of The Mango Tree (1977), and Keneally’s confronting novel, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972), about an Aboriginal man’s attempt to come to terms with white society, was adapted for the screen in 1978, directed by Fred Schepisi. Elizabeth O’Connor’s award-winning novel The Irishman (1960) was adapted for film in 1978, followed the next year by Gillian Armstrong’s highly successful film My Brilliant Career, adapted from Miles Franklin’s novel (1901). This film launched the international careers of Armstrong and its lead actors Neill and Judy Davis. 405

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Into the next decade inspiration for literary adaptations came increasingly from contemporary authors and this has continued as an observable trend in the decades that have followed. Bruce Beresford directed the teen drama Puberty Blues in 1981, based on a popular novel of the same name by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey published two years earlier. The film closely followed the plot of the novel, although Lette has subsequently expressed disappointment in the way the film sanitised and avoided some of the important issues explored around sex, power and women’s bodies (Gleeson). Several years later Beresford directed another adapted script, The Fringe Dwellers (1986), based on the novel by Nene Gare (1961) about the life of a young Aboriginal girl and her family living on the edge of a racist and closed white society. The following year Helen Garner’s novel Monkey Grip was transferred for the screen, based on a script co-written by Garner and Ken Cameron. The film starred Hazelhurst as a single mother involved in an on/off relationship with a heroin addict (played by Friels). Also released in 1982 was The Year of Living Dangerously, a romantic drama set against the backdrop of political unrest in Indonesia starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. The film was based on Christopher Koch’s awardwinning novel of the same name (1978), from a script co-written by the director Weir and playwright David Williamson. Other notable adaptations of this period were An Indecent Obsession (1985) based on Colleen McCullough’s novel of the same name (1981), and For Love Alone (1986) adapted from Christina Stead’s novel (1944). Frank Moorhouse wrote two film scripts based on his short stories – The Coca-Cola Kid (1985) inspired by The Americans, Baby (1972) and The Electrical Experience (1974), and The Everlasting Secret Family (1988) from four short stories published in 1980 under the same title. Peter Carey collaborated with film director Ray Lawrence to produce the script for a film adaptation of his Miles Franklin award-winning novel Bliss in 1985. The film tells the story of an ethically compromised advertising executive who has a near-death experience. The film is a masterpiece of black humour spliced into a series of surreal stories and images. The film was nominated for the prestigious Palm D’Or at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival (Aveyard, Moran, and Vieth 46). Another of Carey’s highly regarded novels, Oscar and Lucinda (1988), was adapted for the screen in 1998, although Carey did not co-write the script on this occasion. The film was produced as a UKAustralian co-production, directed by Armstrong and starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett.

1990s to the Present Social realism has always been a significant genre in Australian film and particularly so since the 1990s where such creative projects are able to accommodate the conflicting demands for significant and relevance, budgetary constraints and dramatic expectations. Everywhere recognised but usually left undefined, social realist films narrate and dramatise particular social issues and problems and, at the same time, often aim to convey a wider universality or pervasiveness in the human experience (217). Many of the novels and stories of writer Tim Winton are grounded in the everyday and have been a popular source of adaptations for Australian filmmakers in recent years. Films made from Winton’s stories include That Eye, the Sky (novel 1986, film 1994), the critically acclaimed In the Winter Dark (novel 1988, film 1998), for which Winton collaborated on the script, and The Turning (novel 2004, film 2013), an innovative team-produced mosaic of eight stories taken from the book of the same name. In a case of a reversal of the usual creative trajectory, Richard Flanagan’s film The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1996) began life as a screenplay rather than a novel. Flanagan struggled to get finance for the project, so instead turned it into a novel. Phillip Gwynne’s powerful novel about interracial friendship focused on an Australian Rules football club in a rural town, Deadly, Unna? (1998), was subsequently used as the basis for the Indigenous coming-of-age film Australian Rules (2002). While the Australian rural landscape features heavily in these films of the 1990s, urban environments and the struggles of life in cities were capturing greater creative interest. He 406

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Died with a Felafel in His Hand (1994), John Birmingham’s autobiographical novel about life as a young man in shared housing, was the basis for a film by Richard Lowenstein released in 2001. A film based on Elliot Perlman’s novel Three Dollars (1998) was released in 2005 with a script co-written by Perlman and the film’s director Robert Connolly. The following year Luke Davies’s book Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction (1997) formed the basis for a film starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, for which Davies worked with director Neil Armfield to produce the script. Interest in historical stories and literary works remains. After some years of success overseas, Australian director Phillip Noyce returned in 2002 to direct the acclaimed adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s story of immense courage and spirit, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996). Almost a decade later another celebrated director now based in the United States, Fred Schepsi, returned to direct the adaptation of Patrick White’s Eye of the Storm (novel 1973, film 2011). This was a lavish production in the European art cinema tradition: propelled by the emotions of the characters while the narrative lumbered along, taking a subordinate position to memory and dream-like sequences. The film boasted a star-studded cast including Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush and Charlotte Rampling, and was named Best Australian Film at the Melbourne Film Festival in the year of its release. To date this is the only screen adaptation of White’s work, although there was an unsuccessful attempt in the late 1970s to bring Voss (1957) to the screen by Sydney entertainment entrepreneur Harry M. Miller. While not set in the past, the adaptation of Julia Leigh’s first novel The Hunter (published in 1999, film 2011) is another film that blurs the distinctions between realism and the metaphysical. The story follows a lone ‘hunter’ (played by Willem Dafoe) in search of the supposedly extinct Tasmanian Tiger but is also deeply symbolic of the problematic relationship between humans and their environment and the greed and immorality of corporations. More recently, Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker (2000) was adapted for the screen by veteran Australian filmmaker Jocelyn Moorehouse in 2015, and Aboriginal filmmaker Rachel Perkins directed the adapted version of Craig Silvey’s story of alienation and prejudice Jasper Jones (novel 2009, film 2017).

Theorising Literary-Cinematic Adaptation Producing a film based on well-known source material can be appealing for filmmakers. Utilising audience familiarity and building on popular and/or critical success of the source material can help mitigate financial risk and in the case of Australia (as demonstrated above) has proved to be broadly successful in giving rise to multiple noteworthy films, some of which have also generated solid commercial returns. However, with audience awareness of original source material also comes predetermined ideas and internally visualised interpretations of the text in question. The individualised nature of these expectations means that they can be difficult to satisfy. It is a familiar lament of literary fans that the screen version of a particular novel or other text fails to represent the story or characters in the way they had imagined them. Yet the assumption that a text will be read before the film version is watched constitutes a linear progression that cannot be depended upon in the same way as it once could be. The commercial arrangement between authors and their publishers and film studios and distributors is an increasingly complex one, with novels sometimes rereleased to coincide with the launch of the film version complete with a cover image from the movie. The aim clearly being to engage a new readership whose interest is inspired by seeing the film, not the other way around. Literary studies have often regarded the adaption of a written text for the screen as a process that diminishes, rather than enhances or expands the original source material. At the core of such arguments is a dissatisfaction with the complex and inconsistent processes of transference and a perceived loss of fidelity. Virginia Woolf famously referred to the cinema as a ‘parasite’ (382), 407

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taking from literature but delivering a diminished version of it by conveying emotion visually rather than in writing. Woolf asserted the visual was little more than ‘toys and sweetmeats’ to keep the brain quiet – not something to challenge or deeply engage audiences by conveying the full complexity of story and characters (381–382). Similar, albeit more nuanced concerns can be traced through literary criticism and popular writing about adaptation in the decades that have followed (for example, Spiegel, Kellman, Patterson). Film studies, however, has only relatively recently been concerned with investigating and understanding the processes of screenwriting. Instead there has been a preoccupation with authorship and the pre-eminence of the director as the dominant creative driving force However, film scholars who have considered the work of those who write for the screen and the process of adaption in particular have tended to view it positively. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (3) argue that adaptations contribute to literary survival by creating metamorphoses that can increase engagement with source materials because of the wider diffusion of film. Taking a slightly different approach, Deborah Cartmell celebrates the democratising effects of adaption which can render a literary text more accessible due to the popularity and comprehensibility of film as a format (1–5). While interested in the same phenomenon, literary and film studies approaches to adaptation tend to be grounded in quite different concerns and this has implications for how these competing ideas might be reconciled or understood. Literary perspectives often foreground issues of form, placing the written work at the centre of critical evaluation and according value to originality. Film studies have been no less influenced by the emphasis of its disciplinary focus, but rather than focus on form, what has been of greater interest is the cultural influence and interpretation (reception) of adapted texts. In considering these different perspectives, it is also useful to think about some of the practical dimensions of adaptation and in particular the creative possibilities (and limitations) of different textual formats. In a film the audience is usually presented with a main character who will be embedded in the core of the plot. This character will face a problem or issue and then embark upon a journey that leads to the transformation of that person or his/her circumstances (and a resolution of the story) (Bordwell, Thompson and Smith 77–79, 85–86). While there are many films that subvert this structure, this is very broadly (and somewhat crudely) the convention of mainstream feature film. Literary works are not as constrained by these same conventions. While there are certainly texts that follow similar kinds of narrative structures, literary stories propelled by theme and character are not so novel as they are in film. Literature enables readers to understand characters based on what they think. A writer can explain protagonists’ thoughts and feelings and reactions – this is how in a large part the reader comes to understand them and their personal journey within the story. In an audiovisual medium audiences have no access to these insights other than through devices like voiceovers or asides to camera, which are devices used sparingly. Rather, film viewers tend to understand characters by what they do, how they react as demonstrated through dialogue, body language, facial expression and actions (Clayton 131). In the case of literary novels the process of adaption often involves taking a lengthy, detailed written work and transferring it to 90–120 minutes of film. It is generally not possible to include every detail of the book because there simply is not time to cover it. Consequently, decisions must be made about what to cut and what to keep – but that process is not straightforward either. Once some content is removed a narrative may need to be adjusted, and different characters may do different things within the story for reasons of expediency as well as creativity (Cahir 14–15). Such judgements are unavoidably subjective and interpretative, but at the same time creative in their own right. So often the process of adaptation is associated with the editing or reduction and hence immediate or perfunctory associations with diminution are made without giving due regard to the nature of the creative process overall. While the necessity of condensing a work applies in many cases, it is important to bear in mind that the challenges can be quite different for screenplays based on shorter literary works. 408

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The challenges of expanding and elaboration may be just as subjective but demand arguably more creativity and rigour on the part of the screenwriter. The film adaptation of The Man from Snowy River is grounded in Paterson’s poem and the action is framed fairly closely around the events of that story surrounding the escape, chase and recapture of a very valuable thoroughbred colt. However, in order to sustain a feature-length film and broaden its audience appeal, other elements were added that were not part of the original story at all, such as the abrasive American owner of the colt and his daughter who serves as Jim’s (‘the Man’) love interest – a fairly predictable Hollywood-style story. Somewhat more complex was the adaptation of American writer Raymond Carver’s minimalist story, ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ (1976), into the Australian film, Jindabyne (2006). Carver’s short stories rarely follow a conventional narrative and eschew transformational events. This particular story is a careful and poignant insight into a particularly intense emotional moment for the central character but is without conclusion or resolution. In material terms it may appear initially to offer a screen writer very little to work from, yet it was deftly expanded by Beatrix Christian into a full-length film script that received a number of critical and industry nominations and awards. In adapting literary texts for films it is crucial to bear in mind that this process constitutes a fundamental shift not just in the medium of presentation, but in the approach to storytelling. As this brief outline has highlighted, it is a complex process of transference, reinterpretation and reconfiguration that in many ways also gives rise to elements of originality in itself.

Works Cited Aveyard, Karina, Albert Moran, and Errol Veith. Historical Dictionary of Australian and New Zealand Cinema. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018. Bordwell, David, Kirstin Thompson, and Jeff Smith. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2017. Cahir, Linda Constanzo. Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Cartmell, Deborah. A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Clayton, Sue. ‘Visual and Performative Elements in Screen Adaptation: A Film-Maker’s Perspective.’ Journal of Media Practice 8.2 (2007): 129–145. Gaunson, Stephen. ‘Australian (Inter)national Cinema: The Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, 1926–1928, Australasian Films Ltd. and the American Monopoly.’ Studies in Australasian Cinema 6.3 (2012): 291–300. Gleeson, Kate. ‘Show True Puberty Blues, Not Whitewash.’ Sydney Morning Herald 18 Jan. 2012. . Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Jackson, Sally. ‘Like Boils the Cinématographe Tends to Break Out – The Films of the 1896 Melbourne Cup: The Lawn Near the Bandstand.’ Screening the Past 39 (2015). . Kaufman, Tina. Wake in Fright. Sydney, NSW: Currency, 2010. Kellman, Steven. ‘The Cinematic Novel: Tracking a Concept.’ Modern Fiction Studies 33.3 (1987): 467–477. Patterson, John. ‘By the Book.’ Guardian 15 Mar. 2008. . Pike, Andrew, and Ross Cooper. Australian Film: 1900–1977. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Spiegel, Alan. Fiction and the Cameron Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1976. Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, ed. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Chichester: Blackwell, 2005. Valentine, Victor. ‘Darcy [sic] Hits the Jackpot.’ Argus 25 Jul. 1955: 4. . Woolf, Virginia. ‘The Cinema.’ The Nation and Athenaeum 3 Jul. 1926: 381–383.

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INDEX

Abbott, Tony 108, 114, 158 Abdel-Fattah, Randa 194–7, 199–201 Does My Head Look Big in This? 194–7, 201 ‘The Double-Bind of Writing as an Australian Muslim Woman’ 201 ‘Rev. Nine Parts of Desire’ 200 Aboriginal 27–8, 31, 36–7, 42, 65, 93, 99–106, 113, 158, 177, 184, 186–90, 199, 204, 207–9, 211, 230–1, 237, 244, 245, 249, 278, 295–301, 330, 338, 340, 355, 375–6, 380, 384–91, 397, 405–7 Aboriginal Gothic 390 Academy Award 404 Adams, Carol J. 284, 289 The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory 284 Adams, Francis 39–40, 223 ‘A Glimpse of China’ 223 ‘The Kangaroo Hunt’ 39 Poetical Works of Francis W.L. Adams 39 ‘To India’ 223 Adamson, Robert 211, 337, 341 The Goldfinches of Baghdad, 337 Adelaide, Debra 237 Adelaide Festival 77–8 Adelaide Fringe Festival 347 The Adelaide Observer (periodical) 11 Adey, Peter 358 Mobility 358 Adiga, Aravind 211 The White Tiger 211 Adler, Louise 140 Adorno, Theodor 315–16, 319, 322 Dialectic of Enlightenment 315 Aesop 14 Aesop’s Fables 14 Against the Wind 395, 396, 398 The Age (periodical) 10, 40, 89, 150, 165, 215, 256, 308 Ahern, Michael 66, 71–2

Ahmad, Michael Mohammed 304, 308 The Lebs 308 The Tribe 308 Ahmed, Leila 193, 196, 201 A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America 193 Ailwood, Sarah 183 ‘Anxious Beginnings: Mental Illness, Reproduction and Nation Building in “Prelude” and Prelude to Christopher’ 183 Aitken, Adam 224, 339, 342 Archipelago 342 Eighth Habitation 224, 339 Akerholt, May-Brit 78–81 ‘“A Glorious, Terrible Life”: The Dual Image in Patrick White’s Dramatic Language’ 79–81 Patrick White 79 Albiston, Jordie 340 The Book of Ethel 340 Aldridge, James 205 Alexander, Neal 184 ‘Introduction’ (Regional Modernisms) 184 Alizadeh, Ali 109, 340 ‘The Realpoetik Manifesto’ 340 ‘We’ 109 All Saints 398 Allam, Lorena 278–9 ‘Indigenous Voice to Parliament Given New Momentum at Burunga Hearings’ 278 ‘Pat Dodson and Nigel Scullion Spar Over “Perplexing” Indigenous Voice Budget Allocation’ 279 Allen, Chadwick 186 Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies 186 Allen, R.M. 218 Mesopotamia and India 218 Allyne, Kerry 366 D’Alpuget, Blanche 221

410

Index Turtle Beach 221 Althans, Katrin 328, 390 Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film 328 Altman, Dennis 105 ‘The Myth of Mateship’ 105 Alvarez, Ivy 339 Amanuddin, Syed 209 Andersen, Hans Christian 378–9 ‘The Little Match Girl’ 378 Anderson, Don 141, 339 ‘Country Poetry and Town Poetry: A Debate With Les Murray’ 339 Anderson, Ethel 208 Indian Tales 208 Anderson, Jessica 304, 307 Tirra Lirra by the River 307 Anderson, Warwick 48 Andrada, Eunice 224, 338 Flood Damages 224, 338 Andrews, Barry (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 367 Andrews, Julie 404 Ang, Ien 237 Angas, George 37–8 Kangaroo Hunting, Near Port Lincoln 37, 38 Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand 38 South Australia Illustrated 38 Angshuman, Kar 209 Angus and Robertson 11, 14–15 Anniah Gowda, H.H. 209 Antipodes (periodical) 119 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 184 Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers 184 Archer-Lean, Clare 283 ‘Revisiting the “Problem” of Anthropomorphism through Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014)’ 283 Archibald, J.F. 11, 13, 15, 235 Ardern, Jacinda 193 Arendt, Hannah 3 The Argus (periodical) 215 Arimitsu, Yasue 203 ‘The Contemporary State of Academic Appraisal of Australian Literature in Japanese Universities’ 203 Arjomand, Amir 48 (ed.) Worlds of Difference 48 Armellino, Pablo 264, 268 Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative: An Account of the Socio-topographic Construction of Space in Australian Literature 264 Armfield, Neil 77, 80–1 ‘Patrick White: A Centenary Tribute’ 80 Armstrong, Gillian 405–6

Armstrong, Philip 282 What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity 282 Aronson, Linda 398 Television Writing: The Ground Rules of Series, Serials and Sitcom 398 Art in Australia (periodical) 184, 188 Artemis 236 Arthurs, Jane 347 ‘Stand-Up Comedy’ 347 Ashbery, John 341 Ashcroft, Bill 210, 321 (ed.) Patrick White Centenary: The Legacy of a Prodigal Son 210 Ashe, Oscar 223 Chu Chin Chow 223 Aslet, Clive 35 Villages of Britain: The Five Hundred Villages that Made the Countryside 35 Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) 119, 167, 203 Astley, Thea 136, 138–40, 206, 239–40, 275, 385, 387–91 The Acolyte 140 ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit’ 388 Collected Stories 389 A Descant for Gossips 136 ‘Hunting the Wild Pineapple’ 385, 389 It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album 385, 390–1 ‘Ladies Only Need Apply’ 389–90 The Well Dressed Explorer 139 Atherden, Geoffrey 398 Atherton, Cassandra 342 The Australian Anthology of Prose Poetry 342 Atkinson, Louisa 25, 30–1 ‘Notes on the Months: October’ 30 ‘A Voice from the Country: After Shells in the Limestone’ 31 ‘A Voice from the Country: Among the Murrumbidgee Limestones’ 31 ‘A Voice from the Country: August’ 31 ‘A Voice from the Country: Recollections of the Aborigines’ 31 ‘A Voice from the Country: Reptilia’ 31 Atkinson, Meera 118 Traumata 118 The Atlas (periodical) 224 Attridge, Derek 175 Atwood, Margaret 289, 379, 389 The Handmaid’s Tale 289 d’Aulnoy (Madame) 379 Aurealis (periodical) 119 Austen, Jane 264 The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (periodical) 119 The Australian (periodical) 136

411

Index The Australian Anthropological Journal (periodical) 376 The Australian Bicentennial Authority (ABA) 99–102, 104, 239 Australian Book Review (periodical) 129, 131, 140 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) 217, 219, 393–7, 399, 402 Australian Feminist Studies (periodical) 140, 236 Australian Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) 125–6 The Australian Home Journal (periodical) 385 Australian Human Rights Commission 256–7 Australian Humanities Review (periodical) 119 The Australian Journal (periodical) 10, 30, 368 Australian Natives Association (ANA) 165 Australian Performing Group (APG) 89–90, 93 Australian Poetry Journal (periodical) 302 Australian Research Council 117 Australian Rules (film) 406 Australian Society of Authors 66, 72 The Australian Town and Country Journal (periodical) 10, 368 The Australian Woman’s Mirror (periodical) 55, 365 The Australian Women’s Book Review (periodical) 140, 142, 236 Australian Women’s Reading Challenge 142 The Australian Women’s Weekly (periodical) 365–6, 368 Australian Writers’ Guild 398 Aveyard, Karina 402–3, 405–6 Historical Dictionary of Australian and New Zealand Cinema 402–3, 405–6 Axon (periodical) 118–19 Azam, Maryam 277 The Hijab Files 277 Azhagarasan, R 209 Babe 287 Bacchilega, Cristina 374, 379 ‘Decolonising the Canon: Critical Challenges to Eurocentrism’ 374 Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder 379 Badcock, John 35 Bail, Murray 307, 380 Eucalyptus 380 Bailey, Bert 403 Bailey, R. 65 ‘Our “Wowser State”’ 65 Bakaitis, Helmut 92 Baker, Candida 138, 238 Yacker: Australian Writers Talk About their Work 138, 238 Baker, Dallas J. 241 ‘Introduction: Queer Writing – Setting the Scene’ 241

Baker, Kate 9 Baker, Sidney J. 136 Bakhtin, Mikhail 263–4 Rabelais and his World 263 Baldwin, James 67 Another Country 67 Bandyopadhyay, Debnarayan 210 Banfield, E.J. 354 The Confessions of a Beachcomber 354 Banks, Joseph 30 Barak, William (King Barak) 279, 376 Baranay, Ines 209–10 Neem Dreams 209 With the Tiger 209 Barley Charlie (TV Show) 398 Barnard, Marjorie 55, 144, 167, 184 Barnes, John 10, 12–15 (ed.) Bushman and Bookworm: Letters of Joseph Furphy [‘Tom Collins’] 9, 13, 15 The Order of Things: A Life of Joseph Furphy 10, 12–15 Barnett, Henry 402 Barnett, Tully 118 ‘Teaching Traumatic Life Narratives: Affect, Witnessing, and Ethics’ 118 Barrett, Charles 354 The Bush Ramblers: A Story for Australian Children 354 Barthes, Roland 233, 319–20 ‘The Death of the Author’ 233 Mythologies 319–20 Bartlett, Alison Jamming the Machinery 239 Bartlett, Norman 167, 219 ‘He Has Come to Study Our Writers’ 167 With the Australians in Korea 219 Bascom, William 375 Basically Black 93 Bastard Boys 397–8 Battye, Don 92 Baudelaire, Charles 316, 319, 342 Baynton, Barbara 5, 134–5, 137, 139, 236, 265, 297, 360–1, 386 Bush Studies 135, 137, 265, 361 ‘The Chosen Vessel’ 137, 360 ‘Squeaker’s Mate’ 137, 361 Bean, C.E.W. 26, 344–5 The Beard (play) 89 Beckett, Samuel 75, 79 Endgame 79 Bedford, Jean 102 Sister Kate 102 Bedford, Joan 101 A Lease of Summer 101 Bedford, Josephine 362 Bedford, Randolph 223 White Australia or The Empty North 223

412

Bee, John 35 Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-Ton, and the Varieties of Life, Forming the Completest and Most Authentic Lexicon Balatronicum Hitherto Offered to the Notice of the Sporting World 35 Beeby, George 61 A Loaded Legacy 61 Beeding, Francis 59 Beesley, Luke 340 Behrendt, Lahrissa 237–8 Beirne, Rebecca 397 (ed.) Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand 397 Bell, Graham 246 Bell, Mabel 246 Bellamy 395 Bellamy, Edward 12 Looking Backward 12 Bellanta, Melissa 18, 22 Bellear, Lisa 237 Benjamin, Walter 262–3, 269, 322 Bennett, Arnold 57 Bennett, Bruce 101, 167, 210, 266 Bennett, George 37–8 Wanderings in NSW, Batavia, Pedir Coast, Singapore and China 37 Bennett, James E. 397 (ed.) Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand 397 Benson, Stephen 375 Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory 375 Bentham, George 30 Flora Australiensis 30 Benwell, Bethan 173 Beresford, Bruce 405–6 Berman, Jessica 183–4 ‘Toward a Regional Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Mulk Raj Anand’ 184 Berndt, Ronald 298–300 ‘Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone’ 298–300 Bernstein, Richard J. 4 ‘Derrida: The Aporia of Forgiveness?’ 4 Bettle, Maureen 326 Beveridge, Judith 224, 275–7, 337 Devadatta’s Poems 224 Wolf Notes 224 Bharat, Meenakshi 211 (ed.) Fear Factor: Terror Incognito 212 Bianchi, Helen 366 Biehler, Ray 92 Bielenstein, Gabrielle Maupin 167 ‘Environment and Australian Novels’ 167 The Big Issue (periodical) 129 bin Laden, Osama 200 von Bingen, Hildegard 277, 280 Binns, Bronwyn 398 Birch, Tony 279

‘The True History of Beruk’ 279 Bird, Delys 235, 238, 326 (ed.) Killing Women: Rewriting Detective Fiction 238 Birmingham, John 407 He Died with a Felafel in His Hand 407 Birns, Nicholas 2–4, 274, 304 (ed.) A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900 3 Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead 3–4 (ed.) Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature 3 Bishop, Stephanie 110, 143 The Other Side of the World 110 Bjelke Petersen, Marie 368 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh 64–5, 68, 71 Blackman, Barbara 246, 251 BlackWattle Press 240 Blainey, Geoffrey 100 Blair, Ron 92 Blake, Elissa 79–80 ‘Patrick White’s The Ham Funeralhas Never Been Easy to Digest’ 79–80 Blake, William 51, 318 Blake-Palmer, Geoffrey 353 Blanchard, Bethanie 151 ‘The Stella Count: Why Do Male Authors Still Dominate Book Reviews?’ 151, 152 Blanchett, Cate 406 Blanchot, Maurice 314 Blinky Bill: The Mischievous Koala 403 Blinky Bill: The Movie 403 Blue Fin 405 Blue Heelers 398 The Blue Mountains Mystery 403 Blue Murder 398 Blundell, Graeme 89, 397 Blunden, Godfrey 208 A Room on the Route 208 Blunt, Emily 405 Boake, Capel 306 Painted Clay 306 Bobis, Merlinda 223, 237, 258 Locust Girl: A Lovesong 258 White Turtle 223 Boddy, Michael 91–2 Bode, Katherine 10, 26, 134, 240–1 Damaged Men, Desiring Women 240 Reading by Numbers 241 A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History 26 Boer War 219 Boey, Kim Cheng 224, 339 Between Stations 224 The Bold and the Beautiful 164 Boldrewood, Rolf (Thomas Alexander Browne) 10–12, 402 Robbery Under Arms 11, 206, 402

413

Index Bolte, Henry 88–90 Bolton, Ken 341 Bones, Helen 57 Bonner, Frances 160 ‘Personalising Current Affairs without Becoming Tabloid: The Case of Australian Story’ 160 Boochani, Behrouz 231–2 No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison 231 Booker Prize (see Man Booker) 148 The Boomerang (periodical) 222 Boone, Joseph A. 157 Boothby, Guy 204, 208, 220 Doctor Nikola 220 My Indian Queen 220 My Strangest Case 208 Borden, Mary 59, 326 Bordwell, David 408 Film Art: An Introduction 408 Borg, Sonia 398 Borlase, James S. ‘Bluecap the Bushranger or the Australian Dick Turpin’ 385 Botting, Fred 329 Bourdieu, Pierre 148, 319 Bowen, Chris 255 Bowles, Kate 397 (ed.) Tomorrow Never Knows: Soap on Australian Television 397 Bowman, Anne 38 Boyack, Neil 307 Transactions 307 Boyd, Martin 206, 397 Lucinda Brayford 397 Outbreak of Love 397 Boyle, Peter 339, 342 Ghostspeaking 342 The BP Magazine (periodical) 54–5, 57–8, 60–1 Braddon, Russell 218, 404 End of a Hate 218 The Naked Island 218 The Year of the Angry Rabbit 404 Bradley, James 131 City of Tongues 131 Bradshaw, Richard 92 Bradstock, Margaret 240 (ed.) Edge City on Two Different Plans: A Collection of Lesbian and Gay Writings from Australia 240 Brady, Veronica 244, 249 ‘The Conservationist’ 249 South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright 244, 249 Braidotti, Rosi 239, 361 Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory 361 Brand, Mona 205, 223 Daughters of Vietnam 223 Brandis, George 193

Brauer, Fae 48 Brayshaw, Megan 50 ‘The Tank Stream Press: Urban Modernity and Cultural Life in Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney’ 50 Brecht, Bertolt 75, 233 Brennan, Bernadette 240, 304 ‘The State of Australian Literature at Our Universities’ 166 A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work 240 Brennan, Christopher 164, 206, 317 Brennan, Michael 337 Brereton, John le Gay 164–6 Brett, Edwin J. (ed.) Jack Harkaway and His Son’s Adventures in Australia 385 Ned Nimble Amongst the Bushrangers of Australia 385 Brett, Judith 140 Brewer, Scott Robert 330 ‘“A Peculiar Aesthetic”: Julia Leigh’s The Hunter and Sublime Loss’ 330 Brides of Christ 398 Bridge, Hilda 306 Our Neighbours 306 Briggs, R.A. 340 Brisbane, Katharine 76, 78, 80 ‘Foreword to Patrick White Collected Plays’ 76, 78 Brissenden, Robert 75–8, 80–1, 249 ‘Five Senses’ 249, 250 ‘The Plays of Patrick White’ 76, 80 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 160 Britten, Adrielle 118 ‘The Family and Adolescent Wellbeing: Alternative Models of Adolescent Growth in the Novels of Judith Clarke’ 118 Broadside Festival of New Feminist Ideas 142 Broinowski, Alison 219, 237 Take One Ambassador 219 The Yellow Lady 237 Brontë, Charlotte 14, 156 Jane Eyre 14 Brontë, Emily 137, 156 Brooker, Peter 185 ‘Introduction’ (Geographies of Modernism) 185 Brookes, Mabel 218 Crowded Galleries 218 Brooks, Barbara 49–50, 52, 182, 238, 271 Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life 49, 52, 182 (ed.) Mudmaps: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing 238 Brooks, David 240 Poetry and Gender 240 Brooks, Geraldine 194, 197–201 Nine Parts of Desire. The Hidden World of Islamic Women 194, 197–9 Brooksbank, Anne 398 Brophy, Kevin 118

414

Index Patterns of Creativity. Investigations into the Sources and Methods of Creativity 118 ‘The Poet and the Criminal: Dreams, Neuroscience and a Peculiar Way of Thinking’ 118 Brothers Grimm 375, 381 Brown, Bryan 404 Brown, Lachlan 5, 224, 275, 277, 304–5, 308–10, 312, 338–9 ‘Coming Home’ 309 Limited Cities 308, 339 Lunar Inheritance 224, 308, 338–9 ‘Outstretched Arms’ 310 ‘Poem for a Film’ 309–10 ‘Twenty Sestets’ 310 ‘Urban Sprawl. Macquarie Fields. Spring’s Edge 2004’ 309 Brown, Pam 341 Browne, Thomas Alexander 402 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 263 ‘A True Dream’ 263 Bruce, Joan 69, 79 Little Red School Book 69 Brueggemann, Brenda Jo 246 Deaf Subjects: Between 246 Bryson, Bill 355–6 Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country 356 Buck, Pearl S. 61 The Young Revolutionist 61 Buckley, Vincent 275 Collected Poems 275–6 Poetry and the Sacred 275 Buckmaster, Luke 86 Buckridge, Patrick 54, 61 Buick, Bob 218 All Guts and No Glory: The Story of a Long Tan Warrior 218 The Bulletin (periodical) 9–11, 13–15, 19, 21, 25–6, 28, 58, 134–5, 137, 141–2, 165, 204, 235–6, 296–9 Bulletin Newspaper Company 11–12, 14–16 The Bulletin Reciter 11 The Bulletin Story Book 11 Bunda, Tracey 238 Bunyan, John 299 Burchett, Wilfred 219 Vietnam North 219 Burke, Edmund 296 Burke, Michael 120 Burn, Ian 186 ‘Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial Interpretation’ 186 Burney, Frances 360 The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties 360 Burns, Belinda 304 Burns, Connie 140 (ed.) Eclipsed: Two Centuries of Australian Women’s Fiction 140

Burns, Ed 399 Burns, Shannon 112–13, 127 Burroughs, William S. 263–4, 267 Naked Lunch 263, 267 Bushman’s Bible 10 Buvelot, Louis 296 Buzo, Alexander 87, 89–90, 92, 223 Makassar Reef 223 Norm and Ahmed 87, 89, 93 Caddy, Caroline 337 Cahill, Michelle 109, 224, 255–6, 259, 338–9 ‘The Colour of Dream: Unmasking Whiteness’ 256, 259 The Herring Lass 338 Letter to Passoa 224 Vishvarūpa 338 Cahir, Linda Constanzo 408 Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches 408 Callahan, David 2 (ed.) Contemporary Issues in Australian Literature 2 Callil, Carmen 239 Calvert Books 365 Cambridge, Ada 134, 138, 236, 369 A Marked Man: Some Episodes in His Life 369 Campbell, Anita 60–1 ‘The Bookshelf ’ 60 Campbell, Craig 66 ‘MACOS and SEMP: Queensland (and Australia), 1970s–1990s’ 66 Campbell, Elizabeth 340 Campbell, Marion May 204, 321 konkretion 321 Campioni, Mia 239 The Canberra Times (periodical) 139, 397 Cannold-McDonald, Leslie 140, 143 Cantrell, Kate 362 ‘Interview with Michelle Dicinoski’ 362 Cantrell, Leon 134 (ed.) A.G. Stephens: Selected Writings 134 Capek, Karel 60 Letters from England 60 Cappiello, Rosa 240 Oh Lucky Country 240 Captain James Cook RN 396, 398 Cardell, Kylie 347 ‘The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir’ 347 Cardullo, Bert 77–8 What is Dramaturgy? 77 Carey, Gabrielle 406 Puberty Blues 406 Carey, Jane 52 Carey, Peter 102, 105, 118, 204, 206, 211, 232, 304, 306–7, 310, 324, 406 Bliss 307, 406 Illywhacker 105

415

Index Oscar and Lucinda 105, 406 Parrot and Olivier in America 232 The Tax Inspector 307 True History of the Kelly Gang 102 Carman, Luke 112–13, 304, 308 An Elegant Young Man 308 Carmody, Broede 87 Carroll, Dennis 76, 79, 91 Australian Contemporary Drama, 1909–1982: A Critical Introduction 76, 79 Carroll, Lewis 35 The Hunting of the Snark 35 Carroll, Steven 306–8 The Art of the Engine Driver 307 Forever Young 307 The Gift of Speed 307 Spirit of Progress 307 The Time We Have Taken 307 The Year of the Beast 307 Carruthers, A.J. 341 Carson, Susan J. 183, 184 ‘From Sydney and Shanghai: Australian and Chinese Women Writing Modernism’ 183 ‘Paris and Beyond: The Transnational/National in the Writing of Christina Stead and Eleanor Dark’ 183 ‘Spun from Four Horizons: Rewriting the Sydney Harbour Bridge’ 184 Carter, Angela 379 Carter, David 11, 48, 54–5, 58–9, 61, 182, 184, 185, 188, 205–6, 388 Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity 54–5, 58–9, 61, 186, 188 Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s 182 ‘The Conditions of Fame: Literary Celebrity in Australia between the Wars’ 55 ‘Critics, Writers, Intellectuals: Australian Literature and its Criticism’ 11, 205 ‘Imagination: How People Have Imagined Queensland’ 388 ‘Living with Instrumentalism: The Academic Commitment to Cultural Diplomacy’ 206 ‘Magazine Culture: Notes Towards a History of Australian Periodical Publication, 1920–1970’ 54 ‘Modernity and the Gendering of Middlebrow Book Culture in Australia’ 184 Carter, Paul 102 The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History 102 Cartmell, Deborah 408 Cartmill, Matt 36–7 A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History 36 Caruth, Cathy 325 Carver, Raymond 409 ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ 409

Casanova, Pascale 205 Casey, Maie 218 Tides and Eddies 218 Casey, Richard 219 An Australian in India 219 Cassidy, Bonny 109–10, 341 Castagna, Felicity 108, 113–14, 231, 304–5, 308, 311, 312 The Incredible Here and Now 308 No More Boats 108, 113, 231, 308, 310, 312 Castro, Brian 206, 219, 221, 224, 340 Birds of Passage 206, 221 Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria 340 Shanghai Dancing 219 Street to Street 224 Caswell, Robert 398 Catch-22 66–7 Caulfield, Annie 355 Cavendish, Margaret 36 ‘The Hunting of the Stag’ 36 Poems and Fancies 36 Caxton Press 353 Certain Women 398 de Certeau, Michel 319 The Practice of Everyday Life 319 Chamberlain, Lindy 64 Chambers Encyclopedia 12 Chan, Gabrielle 26 ‘A Time to Cull: The Battle over Australia’s Brumbies’ 26 Chare, Nicholas 329 ‘After the Thylacine: In Pursuit of Cinematic and Literary Improvised Encounters with the Extinct’ 329 Chater, Gordon 94 Chatterjee Padmanabhan, Meeta 209 (ed.) Of Indian Origin: Writings from Australia 209 Chatwin, Bruce. 355 The Songlines 355 Chauvel, Charles 402–3 Jedda 402 A Cheery Soul 76 Chellappan, K. 209 Cheng, Melanie 114 Australia Day 114 Chicago, Judy 239 Childs, Donald J. 48–9 The Chinese Times (periodical) 221 Chirico, Miriam 347 ‘Performed Authenticity: Narrating the Self in the Comic Monologues of David Sedaris, John Leguizamo, and Spalding Gray’ 347 Chisholm, A.R. 60 Chong, Eileen 338 Painting Red Orchids 338 Christesen, Clem 167 Christian, Beatrix 409 Chu, Patricia E. 188

416

Index ‘Modernist (Pre)Occupations: Haiti, Primitivism, and Anticolonial Nationalism’ 188 Chung, Helene 219 Ching Chong China Girl: From Fruit Shop to China Correspondent 219 Cinema Papers (periodical) 397 The Circuit 397–8 Cixous, Hélène 270 Clacy, Ellen 29 Clare, Monica 237 Karobran 237 Clark, Anna 27, 100 The History Wars 27, 99–100 Clark, Judith 182 Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life 49, 52, 182 Clark, Manning 100, 105 Clarke, John 398 Clarke, Marcus 42, 296, 306, 385–6, 389, 402 ‘Cannabis Indica’ 386, 389 For the Term of His Natural Life 296, 386, 402 ‘Nasturtium Villas’ 306 ‘Preface’ (Sea Spray and Smoke Drift) 296 Clarke, Maxine Beneba 340 Clarke, Patricia (ed.) The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney 247 (ed.) Half a Lifetime 243, 244, 245 (ed.) Portrait of a Friendship: The Letters of Judith Wright and Barbara Blackman, 1950–2000 247, 252 (ed.) With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright 247 Clarke, Robert 171, 173, 355 ‘Book Clubs and Reconciliation: A Pilot Study on Book Clubs Reading the Fictions of Reconciliation’ 171 ‘Book Clubs, Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, and the Ordinary Reader’ 171 Travel Writing from Black Australia: Utopia, Melancholia, and Aboriginality 355 Clarson and Massina (publisher) 26 Clastres, Pierre 230 The Archeology of Violence 230 ‘Of Ethnocide’ 230 Clayton, Sue 408 ‘Visual and Performative Elements in Screen Adaptation: A Film-Maker’s Perspective’ 408 Clean Straw for Nothing 67 Cleary, Jon 221, 404 Dragons at the Party 221 The Far Away Drums 221 The High Commissioner 221 High Road to China 221, 404 The Long Pursuit 221 The Phoenix Tree 221 The Sundowners 404 A Very Private War 221

Clemens, Justin 340 The Mundiad 340 Cleveland Publishing 365 Cleven, Vivienne 325, 390 Her Sister’s Eye 325, 390 Clifford, James 184 ‘Mixed Feelings’ 184 Clift, Charmian 220 High Valley 220 Clinch, C.A. 164 ‘Australian Literature’ 164, 167 Clinton, Bill 284 Clio 365 ‘Mirror Readers Who Write: Still Another Who Was Piccaninny-Once’ 365 Clune, Frank 209, 216–17, 354 Flight to Formosa 217 Roaming Round Europe: Random Rambles in Paris, Eire, Iceland, Vienna, and Belgium 354 Roaming Round New Zealand: The Story of a Holiday Trip 354 Sky High to Shanghai 216–17 To the Isles of Spice 209 Clutterbuck, James Bennett 38 Port Phillip in 1849 38 Coach Fitz (Lee, T.) 308 Coad, David 22 Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities 22 Cobb & Co 29 Cocker, Jack. 160 ‘Imagine ... Richard Flanagan: Life after Death’ 160 Coetzee, J.M. 118, 155, 175, 211, 282–3 Elizabeth Costello 282–3 Coleman, Aidan 341 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 386 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ 386 Collins, Dale 57 Collins, Felicity 293 Australian Cinema after Mabo 293 Collins, Jackie 128 The Stud 128 Collins, Wilkie 398 Collis, Christy 156 Colubriale, Greg 92 Come to Me My Melancholy Baby 224 Commonwealth Government of Australia ‘2016 Census: National Capital Cities’ 338 Commonwealth of Australia 255 Bills, Migration Legislation Amendment (Offshore Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2011, Second Reading (Official Hansard) 255 Migration Legislation Amendment (Regional Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2012 255 Native Title Act 1993 301 Compton, Jennifer 92 Concerning the Moral Pollution of Children Through Literature 66

417

Index Conder, Charles 297 Conigrave, Timothy 371 Holding the Man 371 Connell, Raewyn 48, 51 Connor, John 36 The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838 36 Conrad, Joseph 56 Conscious and Verbal 223 Continuum (periodical) 397 Conway, Ronald 136–7 ‘Lost Generation’ 137 Cook, George 71 Cook, James (Captain) 20, 30, 103, 113–14, 232, 239, 293, 296 Cook, James Hume 377, 379, 381 Australian Fairy Tales 377 Cook, Kenneth 405 Wake in Fright 405 Cooke, Miriam 200 Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature 200 Cooke, Stuart 108, 247, 250, 337, 342 Opera 342 Speaking the Earth’s Languages 342 ‘(Tony Abbott is a) Flarf Fugue’ 108 Cooper, Charles 220 By Command of Yee-Shing 220 The Soul of Tak-Min 220 Cooper, Melinda J. ‘“Adjusted” Vision: Interwar Settler Modernism in Eleanor Dark’s Return to Coolami’ 184 Cooper, Ross 402–3 Australian Film: 1900–1977 402–3 Cooter, Margaret 152 Cop Shop 396 Copeland, Marion W 283 Copetas, Craig 264 ‘Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman’ 264 Copland, Murray 92 Copland, Simon 346 Cordite Poetry Review (periodical) 209, 312 Cork, Dorothy 366 Cornish, Abbie 407 coronavirus 1–3 Corris, Peter 136 ‘Misfits and Depressives in the Raw’ 136 Coslovich, Gabriella 150 Costello, Moya 238, 282 (ed.) Mudmaps: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing 238 Cotton, Olive 184 Cottrell, Dorothy 61 Earth Battle 61 Couani, Anna 140, 238 (ed.) Telling Ways: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing 238 A Country Practice 395–6, 398

The Courier-Mail (periodical) 65, 67–8, 167 Courtenay, Bryce 404 The Power of One 404 Couvreur, Jessie (Tasma) 134, 138, 368 Cove, Michael 92 Cowan, Anna 371 Untamed 371 Coward, Noel 57 Cowling, George 165–6 ‘Australian Literature: Proposed University Chair: Comment by Professor Cowling’ 165 Cox, Deb 398 Cox, Erle 60 Out of the Silence 60 Cranston, C.A. 210, 338 Craven, Peter 76, 113, 127–9, 131, 337 ‘Patrick White’ 76 ‘Rev. The Clean Dark by Robert Adamson’ 337 Crawford, Jennifer 285 Creating a Nation 239 Cresswell, Tim 359–60 ‘Towards a Politics of Mobility’ 359 The Tramp in America 359 Crime and Punishment 137 Crocker, Walter 219 Australian Ambassador 219 Crocodile Dundee 356 Croft, Julian 15 The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins: A Study of the Works of Joseph Furphy 15 Croggan, Alison 76–7, 79, 81 ‘Patrick White, Playwright’ 76–7 Crombie, Isobel 49–50, 184 Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919–1939 184 Cronin, M.T.C. 342 Talking to Neruda’s Questions 342 Crotty, Martin 21 Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920 21 Crowley, Mart 89 The Boys in the Band 89 Cullen, Hedley 79 Cummings, Philip 208 Wilbur 208 Cummins, Peter 90 Cumpston, John Howard Lidgett 49 Cunningham, Alan 30 Cunningham, Peter 41 Two Years in New South Wales 41 Cunningham, Sophie 150 Cunningham, Stuart (ed.) The Australian TV Book 397 Curlewis, Jean 59 A Current Affair 349–50 Curthoys, Ann 397 ‘In Praise of Prisoner’ 397

418

Index Cusack, Dymphna 205, 236 Cuvier, Georges 51 The Animal Kingdom 51 Da Costa, Cassie 347 ‘The Funny, Furious Anti-Comedy of Hannah Gadsby’ 347 Dad and Dave Come to Town 403 Dad and Dave: On Our Selection 403 Dad Rudd, MP 403 Dadaism 75, 186, 342 Dafoe, Willem 407 The Daily Mail (periodical) 216 Dale, David ‘The 50 Australians Who Matter’ 256 Dale, Leigh 58, 61, 121, 127, 165, 167, 361, 371 ‘Canonising Queer: From Hal to Dorothy’ 371 The Enchantment of English: Professing Literature in Australian Universities 165, 167 ‘New Directions: Introduction’ 121 Daley, V.J. 223 ‘The Quest of Brahma’ 223 Daly, Mary 239 Dalziell, Tanya 367 Settler Romances and the Australian Girl 367 The Damnation of Harvey McHugh 398 Dark, Eleanor 47–52, 181–4, 187–90, 207, 236, 293 The Little Company 182 Prelude to Christopher 50, 52, 119 Slow Dawning 49 Storm of Time 190 The Timeless Land 182, 293 Waterway 187–9 Darnton, Robert 127 ‘What is the History of Books?’ 127 Darwin, Charles 30, 51, 117, 227 On the Origin of Species 51 Dasgupta, Sanjukta 209 David, Ian 398 Davidson, Helen 255 ‘Offshore Detention: Australia’s Recent Immigration History a “Human Rights Catastrophe”’ 255 Davidson, Jim 65 ‘Interview with Thomas Shapcott’ 65 Davidson, Robyn 101, 354–5 Ancestors 101 Tracks 354–5 Davidson, Toby 275 Davies, Luke 267, 407 Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction 267, 407 Davis, Jack 92, 211, 300–1, 407 Davis, Judy 405 Davis, Kimberly Chabot 172, 174 ‘Oprah’s Book Club and the Politics of Cross-Racial Empathy’ 174

‘White Book Clubs and African American Literature: The Promise and Limitations of Cross-Racial Empathy’ 172 Davis, Mark 128, 130–2, 155 ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing’ 128 ‘Who Needs Cultural Gatekeepers Anyway?’ 130–1 Davis, Therese 293 Australian Cinema after Mabo 293 Davison, Frank 58 Man-Shy 58 Davison, Graeme 25 ‘The Exodists: Miles Franklin, Jill Roe and the “Drift to the Metropolis.”’ 25 Davison, Liam 307 The Shipwreck Party 307 Dawe, Bruce 307–8 Dawe, Carlton 220, 223 Kakemonos: Tales of the Far East 223 Rose and Chrysanthemum 220 The Dawn (periodical) 26 Dawn, Gloria 88 Day, Christopher 393 De Groen, Alma 91, 93 de Kretser, Michelle 5, 113–15, 231 The Life to Come 113–14, 231 De Quincey, Thomas 263 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 263 Deadwood 399 Deakin, Alfred 165, 216 Irrigated India 216 Temple and Tomb in India 216 Deane, Joel 340 Dearborn, Tricia 340 Debord, Guy 317 Dennis, C.J. 21, 23, 306, 403 The Moods of Ginger Mick 21 The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke 21, 403 Denton, Barbara 267 Dealing: Women in the Drug Economy 267 Deo, Shastra 340 Derham, Enid 166 Derrida, Jacques 4 Dessaix, Robert 240 (ed.) Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing: An Anthology 240 ‘Introduction’ (Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing: An Anthology) 240 Devanny, Jean 50, 55, 57, 236 Devlin-Glass, Frances 173, 321 ‘More Than a Reader and Less Than a Critic: Literary Authority and Women’s Book Discussion Groups’ 173 Dhawan, R.K. 210 Diamond, Elin 174 Dibble 240

419

Index Dicinoski, Michelle 361–2 Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance 361–2 Dickens, Charles 14, 156, 398 Dickins, Barry 92 Digby, Jenny 238 A Woman’s Voice 238 Dingwell, Joyce 365–6, 368, 372 The Girl at Snowy River 366 ‘The Girl at Snowy River [Final Instalment]’ 365 Dique, J.C.A. 67 ‘Unsuitable Reading’ 67 The Dismissal 398 Disney, Dan 342 either, Orpheus 342 Displaced Persons 398 Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography 337 Dixon, G.C. 216–17 From Melbourne to Moscow 216 Dixon, Robert 10, 182–5, 295, 304, 370 The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales, 1788–1860 295 ‘Home or Away? The Trope of Place in Australian Literary Criticism and Literary History’ 185, 309, 354–5, 397 ‘Introduction’ (Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s) 184 Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronised Lecture Entertainments 182–3 Dixson, Miriam 102, 235 The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present 102, 235 Do Rozario, Rebecca-Anne C. 375, 378 Dobell, William 78–9, 81 The Dead Landlord 79, 81 Dobson, Rosemary 138, 144 In a Convex Mirror 138 Docker, John 55, 397 ‘Feminism, Modernism, and Orientalism in The Home in the 1920s’ 55 ‘In Praise of Prisoner’ 397 Doig, James 385–6 (ed.) Australian Ghost Stories 385–6 (ed.) Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction 384–5 ‘The Death Child’ 386 Dolin, Kieran 293 ‘Place and Property in Post-Mabo Fiction by Dorothy Hewett, Alex Miller and Andrew McGahan’ 293 A Doll’s House 67 Donlevy, Maurice 167 ‘Back to the Pepper Tree to Study Literature’ 167 Donne, John 280 Donovan, Josephine 286, 288 The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals 285–6

Dorrington, Albert 11, 220 Dougan, Lucy 340 Douglas, Kate 118, 216 ‘Teaching Traumatic Life Narratives: Affect, Witnessing, and Ethics’ 118 Dovey, Ceridwen 111, 114, 282–3 Blood Kin 111, 114 The Garden of the Fugitives 114 Only the Animals 282–3 Dowse, Sara 110–11 As the Lonely Fly 110 Doyle, Laura 183 ‘Introduction’ (Geomodernisms) 183 Drake-Brockman, Henrietta 55 Dramaturgy 77–8, 80 Dransfield, Michael 264 Drug Poems 264 Streets of the Long Voyage 264 Drewe, Robert 102, 104 Our Sunshine 102 The Savage Crows 104 Driscoll, Beth 143, 147–9 The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century 143, 147, 149 ‘Twitter, Literary Prizes and the Circulation of Capital’ 147 Du Maurier, Daphne 14 Dudek, Debra 254, 256–8 ‘Under the Wire: Detainee Activism in Australian Children’s Literature’ 254, 256–7 Duggan, Laurie 230, 341 Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901–1939 230 Duigan, John 90 Dun, Mao 204 Dunlop, Eliza Hamilton 25, 27–9, 31 ‘The Aboriginal Mother’ 27, 31 ‘Native Poetry’ 27 Dunlop, W.H. 375 Dunstan, David 209 Dupain, Max 184 Durkheim, Emile 94 The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method 94 Dutton, Geoffrey 88 (ed.) Australia’s Censorship Crisis 88 Dutton, Peter 113 Duwell, Martin 308, 337, 341 ‘Rev. John Kinsella: On the Outskirts’ 337 Dylan, Bob 231 Dyson, Edward 10, 13, 223 ‘Ah Ling the Leper’ 223 Eades, Quinn 340, 345–6, 351 (ed.) Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ 344–6, 351 ‘I Can’t Stop Crying’ 345–6

420

Index ‘I Can’t Stop Crying ... After Yes’ 345–6 ‘I Can’t Stop Crying ... My Gender is Not A Bomb’ 345–6 ‘Introduction: Everyday Activism – Writing, Drawing, and Dreaming from Between the Cracks’ 345 The Echo (periodical) 11 Eckermann, Ali Cobby 237, 338, 340 Ruby Moonlight 340 Edgar, Stephen 339 Edmond, Jacob 182 Edmundson, Melissa 387 Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire 387 Edson, Russell 342 Edwards, Allan 103, 167 ‘Australian Literature Courses’ 167 Edwards, Hazel 208 Fake ID 208 Egan, Greg 118 Quarantine 118 Teranesia 118 Eggert, Paul 9 The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History 9 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 47–8 ‘Multiple Modernities’ 47 El Saadawi, Nawal 200 Eldershaw, M. Barnard 60, 236 A House Is Built 60 Eliot, T.S. 280, 317 Elliott, Brian 166, 292–4, 301–2 The Landscape of Australian Poetry 292–4 Ellis, Bob 92 Ellis, Havelock 136 Ellis, John 91 The Legend of King O’Malley 91 Ellis, Katharine Ferguson 328 Ellison, Jennifer 136, 140 Rooms of Their Own 136, 140 Ellmann, Mary 135, 137 Elvey, Anne 337 Emotions: History, Culture, Society (periodical) 117 Encyclopedia Britannica 12 English, Ethel 378, 381 Australian Fairy Tales 378 ‘Flowers of the Spirit: Little Sunshine’ 378 ‘Pearlie the Mermaid’ 378 ‘Sally Geranium’ 378 English, James 147–9 The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value 148, 149 Ennis, Helen 184 Photography and Australia 184 Enright, Nick 92 Esson, Louis 92, 305 ‘Our Institutions’ 305 Etherington, Ben 113, 128

eTropic (periodical) 119 Ettler, Justine 238 The European Journal of English Studies (periodical) 119 Evans, Anne-Marie 347 ‘Funny Women: Political Transgressions and Celebrity Autobiography’ 347 The Evening Journal (periodical) 10 The Evergreen Review (periodical) 89 Everywoman Press 236 Explorations into Children’s Literature 119 Eyre, Joyce 166 Fabian, Johannes 188, 319 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. 319 Fadiman, Clifton 137 ‘Rev. The Beauties and Furies’ 137 ‘Rev. The Man Who Loved Children’ 137 fairy tales 299, 374–81 Falconer, Delia 127, 282 Fallon, Mary 238 Working Hot 238 Fane, Margaret 55 Fanon, Franz 255 Black Skin, White Masks 255 Farmer, Beverley 140–2, 240, 380 The Seal Woman 380 Farmer, Rhodes 219 Shanghai Harvest: Three Years in the China War 219 Farrell, Michael 118–19, 341–2 (ed.) Ashbery Mode 341 ‘The Geopoetics of Affect: Bill Neidjie’s Story About Feeling’ 118–19, 341 open sesame 342 thempark 341 Favenc, Ernest 370, 386 The Last of Six: Tales of the Austral Tropics 370 The Secret of the Australian Desert 370 Fealy, Susan 340 Feint, Adrian 55 Felski, Rita 171, 175–6 feminism 14, 26–7, 49, 52, 66, 93, 99, 102–3, 126, 139–43, 152, 193–6, 198–201, 205, 207, 211, 232, 235–41, 262, 264–5, 268, 270, 271, 288, 346, 358, 367, 369, 371–2, 379–81, 384 Feminist Writers Festival 142 Fernando, Chitra 209 Ferrier, Carole 51, 102, 235–8, 240 (ed.) As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark 238 ‘Christina Stead’s Poor Women of Sydney, Travelling into Our Times’ 51 (ed.) Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth-Century Australian Women’s Novels 102, 237–8 Jean Devanny 240

421

Index Fetherston, Rachel. 286 Field, Barron 294 Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales 294 Fiennes, Ralph 406 Finch, Peter 108, 402 First Fleet 99, 101, 103, 187, 232, 293 First Peoples 325, 328, 330 First World War see World War I Fish, Stanley 173 Fisher, Rodney 92 Fiske, John 320 Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture 320 Fitch, Toby 108, 342 ‘27 Materialisations of Sydney Cloud’ 108 Fitzgerald, C.P. 71, 219 Why China? 219 FitzGerald, Stephen 219 Comrade Ambassador: Whitlam’s Beijing Envoy 219 Fitzpatrick, Claire 118 ‘Neuroscience in Science Fiction: Brain Augmentation in an Increasingly Futuristic World’ 118 Fitzpatrick, Peter 91 Flanagan, Richard 4, 143, 157, 159–61, 211, 228–9, 240, 321, 330, 406 Death of a River Guide 228–9 The Narrow Road to the Deep North 160 The Sound of One Hand Clapping 406 The Unknown Terrorist 321 Flannery, Richard 322 Flaubert, Gustave 316 Flavell, Helen 238 Flaws in the Glass 78 Flesch, Juliet 372 From Australia With Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels 372 ‘The Wider Brown Land and the Big Smoke: The Setting of Australian Popular Romance’ 372 The Flowering of Australian Literature 209 Flying Doctors 398 Fogarty, Lionel G. 279–80, 331, 338 New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera 331 For Whom the Bell Tolls 67 Forbes, James 56 Forbes, John 341 Ford, Clementine 142 Fight Like a Girl 142 Forrest, Mabel 368 Forshaw, Thelma 144 Forsyth, Kate 379 The Beast’s Garden 379–80 Bitter Greens 379 The Wild Girl 379 Fortier, Anne-Marie 358 ‘Migration Studies’ 358

Fortune, Mary 25, 29–31; see also Waif Wander ‘Detective’s Album’ 30 ‘Melbourne Cemetery’ 31 Foster, David 221 Plumbum: The Ultimate Heavy Metal Experience 221 Fotheringham, Richard 92 Foucault, Michel 172 Fox, Len 224 Gum Leaves and Bamboo 224 Frame, Janet 353, 361–3 An Autobiography: To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table, The Envoy from Mirror City 353 The Lagoon and Other Stories 353 Towards Another Summer 353, 362 Francis, Hannah 347 ‘Hannah Gadsby Wins Barry Award at 2017 Melbourne International Comedy Festival’ 347 Franklin, Miles 9–10, 12, 14–16, 102, 113, 134–6, 138–9, 150–1, 165, 167–8, 184, 189, 236, 238, 241, 297, 308, 324, 367–71, 405 Lord Dunleve’s Ward 14 My Brilliant Career 9–10, 14–16, 135–6, 367, 368, 369, 405 Franzen, Jonathan 137 Fraser, Nancy 149–50 ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’ 149 Frasnelli, Johannes 248 ‘Crossmodal Plasticity in Sensory Loss’ 248 Freeman, John 20 Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life 20 French, Dawn 350 French, Marilyn 152 Freud, Sigmund 227, 353 Friedman, Susan Stanford 182–5 ‘Periodising Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’ 183–5 ‘Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies’ 182–3 ‘World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity’ 182–3 Friels, Colin 402, 406 The Fringe Dwellers 406 Frost, Lucy 238 No Place for a Nervous Lady 238 Frow, John 319–20 Cultural Studies and Cultural Value 319 Fruit: A New Anthology of Contemporary Australian Gay Writing 240 Full Frontal 349 Funder, Anna 110, 130, 322 All That I Am 130 Stasiland 110 Furphy, Joseph 9–16, 297

422

Index Bushman and Bookworm: Letters of Joseph Furphy [‘Tom Collins’] 9, 13, 15 Such is Life 9–10, 12–16 ‘The Teaching of Christ’ 13 Gabler, Neal 157 Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality 157 Gadsby, Hannah 344–5, 347–51 Douglas 348 Nanette 344–5, 347–9 Gale, Peter 209 Gallagher, Katherine 307 Galletly, Sarah 54 The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity 54 Galsworthy, John 57, 60 Gammage, Bill 296 The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia 296 Gandhi, Indira 210 Garner, Helen 134–7, 139–42, 204, 239–40, 262–73, 304, 307, 406 Monkey Grip 136, 262–73, 307, 406 The Yellow Notebook: Diaries, Volume I, 1978– 1987 139 Garrard, Greg 283–4 Ecocriticism 284 ‘Ferality Tales’ 283 The Garret (podcast) 131 Garstin, Crosbie 61 The Dragon and the Lotus 61 Gatens, Moira 239 Gates, Raymond 390 ‘The Little Red Man’ 390 Gaul, Kate 80 Gaunson, Stephen 402 ‘Australian (Inter)national Cinema: The Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, 1926–1928, Australasian Films Ltd. and the American Monopoly’ 402 Gaunt, Mary 216, 368, 386 A Broken Journey 216 A Woman in China 216 Gelder, Ken 127–8, 230, 239, 264–6, 269–71, 282, 296, 327, 369–70 After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007 230 (ed.) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction 369 (ed.) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction 369 Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy 282, 296 The New Diversity: Australian Fiction, 1970–88 239, 264 Gellert, Leon 55, 188

Generation of ’68 341 Genoni, Paul 240 (ed.) Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds 240 George, Rob 92, 94 ‘Vale Steve J. Spears: Obituary’ 94 George Robertson (publisher) 11, 15 Gerster, Robin 304, 345 ‘On Rereading Bean’s Official History’ 345 Gibbs, Anna 238 (ed.) Mudmaps: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing 238 Gibian, Jane 224 Long Shadows 224 Gibson, Katherine 262, 270 (ed.) Postmodern Cities and Spaces 262 Gibson, Mel 406 Gibson, Ross 238 Gilbert, Pam 237 Coming Out from Under 237 Gildersleeve, Jessica 1, 118, 183, 325, 357, 388 Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision 118, 357 ‘Letter to the Australians’ 1 ‘Thea Astley’s Modernism of the “Deep North,” or On (Un)Kindness’ 388 ‘Traumatic Cosmopolitanism: Eleanor Dark and the World at War’ 183 Giles, Fiona 118, 369, 371 ‘Milkbrain: Writing the Cognitive Body’ 118 Too Far Everywhere: The Romantic Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Australia 369 Giles, Paul 181–2, 190 Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of US Literature 182, 190 Gilmore, Mary 61, 108, 144, 166, 204 ‘Mary Gilmore’s Arrows’ 166 The Wild Swan: Poems 61 Gilpin, William 293 Giramondo Publishing Company 224, 304, 308 Girls’ Own 236 Giuffre, Giulia 238 A Writing Life 238 Glastonbury, Keri 338 Newcastle Sonnets 338 Gleeson, Kate 406 ‘Show True Puberty Blues, Not Whitewash’ 406 Gleitzman, Morris 396 On Television: Just Looking 396 Glissant, Édouard 197 Globalisation 2, 200, 258, 310 Goad, Philip 184 ‘Introduction’ (Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917–1967) 184 Goellnicht, Donald C 254 ‘“Ethnic Literature’s Hot”: Asian American Literature, Refugee Cosmopolitanism, and Nam Le’s The Boat’ 254 Golden Builders and Other Poem 275

423

Index Golds, Cassandra 141, 264, 283, 307, 340 Goldsworthy, Kerryn 9–10, 12, 127, 129, 131, 140–1, 264 ‘Dense Clouds of Language’ 141 ‘Feminist Writings, Feminist Readings: Recent Australian Writing by Women’ 140–1 ‘Fiction from 1900 to 1970’ 9–10, 12 Helen Garner 264 Still Life with Cat 131 Goldsworthy, Peter 118, 283, 307, 340 Three Dog Night 118 Wish 283 Gone with the Wind 67 Gonsalves, Roanna 212 The Permanent Resident 212 Good Guys Bad Guys 398 Goodall, Jane 397 Goodall, Peter 394 High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate 394 Gooday, Graeme 247 Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss in Britain 247 Goodman, Paul 70 ‘Education Action Newsletter. Australian Queensland Branch’ 70 Goodwin, Ken 209 Gooneratne, Yasmine 209, 223, 237 Masterpiece 209 Tales from Sri Lanka 223 Gordon, Adam Lindsay 26, 39, 42, 205, 294, 296 Sea Spray and Smoke Drift 42 Gordon, Mona 57 Gordon, Pamela 363 ‘Acknowledgements’ (Towards Another Summer) 363 Gorton, Lisa 340 Press Release 340 Gould, John 30 Gouldthorpe, Alexandra Daisy 166 ‘Lecture Notes, Student Notes Society’ 166 Goulston, Wendy 103 ‘Herstory’s Re/Visions of History’ 103 Grandad Rudd 403 Grant, Bruce 222 Crossing the Arafura Sea 222 Grant, Jamie 224 ‘How to Fold Army Blankets’ 224 The Grapes of Wrath 68 Grass, Günter 68 Cat and Mouse 68 The Grass is Singing 67 Grass Roots 397–8 Graves, John Woodcock 35–6 ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’ 35–6 Gray, Robert 211, 275, 338 Great War see World War I Green, Cliff 398

Green, Daniel 131–2 Green, Dorothy 50–1, 144 Green, H.M. 166 A History of Australian Literature: Pure and Applied. A Critical Review of All Forms of Literature Produced in Australia from the First Books Published after the Arrival of the First Fleet until 1950, with Short Accounts of Later Publications up to 1960 166 An Outline of Australian Literature 166 Greene, Graham 221 The Quiet American 221 Greenop, Frank 54 History of Magazine Publishing in Australia 54 Greenwich, Alex 349 ‘Magda Szubanski was the Wonder Woman of the Yes Campaign’ 349 Greenwood, Justine 354 ‘Australia’ 188, 275, 354 Greer, Germaine 140, 239, 318, 325, 371–2 The Female Eunuch 140, 239, 318, 371 Greig, Beverley 64 ‘Literature and Morals’ 64 Grenville, Kate 101, 103, 140, 211, 232–3, 239 Joan Makes History 101, 103, 232–3, 239 The Secret River 232 Grey, William 34 ‘The Hunt is Up’ 34 Griffith Review (periodical) 347 Griffiths, Howard 398 Griffiths, Michael R. 190, 330 The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture 190 ‘Need I Repeat?: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and (Post)Colonial Iterability in Kim Scott’s Benang’ 330 Griswold, Wendy 176 Regionalism and the Reading Class 176 de Groen, Alma 92 Coming Home 91 de Groen, Frances 397 Serious Frolic 397 Gronlund, Laurence 12 Cooperative Commonwealth 12 Grosz, Elizabeth 239, 262–3, 265, 267–8, 270–1 The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely 263, 267–8 Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. 262–3, 265, 268, 270 Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power 267 Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism 262 Grover, Montague 135 ‘The Red Page: His Books. The Week’s Best: Dazzling Book by a Sydney Girl’ 135 Guardian (periodical) 86, 397 Gudgeon, Mac 398 von Guerard, Eugene 296

424

Index Guest, Stephanie ‘The State of Australian Literature at Our Universities’ 166 Guillory, John 171–3, 176 Gunew, Sneja 136, 138, 140, 237–8 (ed.) Beyond the Echo: Multicultural Women’s Writing 237 Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies 237 (ed.) Telling Ways: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing 238 Gunn, Jeannie 354 We of the Never-Never 354 Gunner, Liz 77 Gwynne, Phillip 406 Deadly, Unna? 406 Haase, Donald 374, 376, 381 ‘Decolonising Fairy-Tale Studies’ 381 Hack, Iola 89 ‘S.M. Watched Actor Say “- Boongs”’ 89 Haddrick, Greg 398 Top Shelf 1: Reading and Writing the Best in Australian TV Drama 397–8 (ed.) Top Shelf 2: Five Outstanding Television Screenplays 398 Hage, Ghassan 311–12 Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society 311 White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society 311 Haggard, H. Rider 60, 367 King Solomon’s Mines 367 She: A History of Adventure 367 Hahn, Emily 263 ‘The Big Smoke’ 263 Haigh, Gideon 130 ‘Feeding the Hand that Bites: The Demise of Australian Literary Reviewing’ 130 Hair 89–90 Hale, Linda 127 Hales, A.G. 220 The Little Blue Pigeon 220 Hall, James 63–5 Australian Censorship: The XYZ of Love 63–5 Hall, Ken G. 403 Hall, Phillip 337 Hall, Rodney 224, 249, 252 Law of Karma 224 Hall, Sandra 63–5 Australian Censorship: The XYZ of Love 63–5 Hall, Stephen 89 ‘Vice Police Seize Scripts of Play’ 89 Hall, Stuart 120 ‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities’ 120 Halliday, Michael 205 Halligan, Marion 307

Ham, Rosalie 407 The Dressmaker 407 Hammill, Faye 55 Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars 55 Hampson, Anne 366 Hampton, Susan 240 (ed.) Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets 240 Handal, Nathalie 197 ‘Both Freedom and Constraint: An Interview with Randa Abdel-Fattah’ 197 Hanif, Mohammed 111 A Case of Exploding Mangoes 111 Hannah, Matthew 55 ‘Photoplay, Literary Celebrity, and The Little Review’ 55 Hannam, Kevin 359 ‘Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings’ 359 Hanrahan, Barbara 304, 307 Kewpie Doll 307 The Scent of Eucalyptus 307 Sea-Green 307 Hanrahan, John 141–2 Hanson, Martin 68 ‘Address in Reply’ (Hansard) 68 Hanson, Pauline 109, 193, 312 Hansord, Katie 27 Haraway, Donna 1, 3–4, 6 Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene 1, 3–4 Hardy, Elle 72 Hardy, Frank 107, 114, 205 Power Without Glory 107, 398 Hardy, Thomas 14, 57 Far From the Madding Crowd 14 Harford, Lesbia 223, 306 The Invaluable Mystery 306 The Poems of Lesbia Harford 223 ‘XLII A Blouse Machinist’ 223 Harkin, Natalie 340 Dirty Words 340 Harle, Rob 209 (ed.) Indo-Australian Anthology of Poetry 209 (ed.) Indo-Australian Anthology of Short Fiction 209 Harney, Elizabeth 186 ‘Introduction: Inside Modernity: Indigeneity, Coloniality, Modernisms’ 186 (ed.) Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism 186 Harper, Jane 204 The Dry 204 Harpur, Charles 206, 294–6, 298, 316 ‘Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest’ 295 Harrex, Syd 209 Harries, Elizabeth W. 374 Twice Upon A Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale 374

425

Index Harris, Margaret 51 ‘Stead, Christina Ellen, 1902–1983’ 51 Harris, Max 88, 138 (ed.) Australia’s Censorship Crisis 88 Harrison, Martin 337, 403 Harrower, Elizabeth 113, 304, 307 In Certain Circles 113 The Long Prospect 307 The Watch Tower 307 Harry, J.S. 341 Hart, Kevin 211, 275 Hartley, Jenny 172–3 Hartley, John 322 Harvey, Melinda 58, 127 ‘2017 Stella Count Analysis’ 142 ‘Literary Prizes and Book Reviews in Australia since 2014’ 143 ‘Taking the Measure of Gender Disparity in Australian Book Reviewing as a Field, 1985 and 2013’ 143 Harwood, Gwen 138 Haskell, Dennis 209 Hasluck, Paul (Sir) 68, 72 Hassam, Andrew 209 Hathorn, Libby 209 A Face in the Water 209 Hattenstone, Simon 97 ‘Barry Humphries: I Defend to the Ultimate My Right to Give Deep and Profound Defence’ 97 Haussegger, Virginia 199–200 Hawke, Bob 19, 100–1 Hay, Ashley 347 ‘All Being Equal – The Novella Project VI’ 347 Hay, John 222 The Invasion 222 Hayes, Antonia 143 Hayles, Katherine 118 ‘Greg Egan’s Quarantine and Teranesia: Contributions to the Millennial Reassessment of Consciousness and the Cognitive Nonconscious’ 118 Hazelhurst, Noni 404, 406 Hazzard, Shirley 138, 240 Transit of Venus 138 Heat (periodical) 224 Heath, Lesley 166 The Muse at Sydney, Literature at the University of Sydney 1852–1932 166 Hebblewhite, Thomas 14–15 Hecate (periodical) 140, 236, 238 Hegel, Georges Wilhelm Friedrich 259 Heidegger, Martin 314 Alltäglichkeit 314 Heiss, Anita 237–8 Heister, Hilmar 118 ‘Empathy and the Sympathetic Imagination in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee’ 118

Helff, Sissy 257 ‘Children in Detention: Juvenile Authors Recollect Refugee Stories’ 257 Hellyer, Jill 144 Hemingway, Ernest 66–7, 136, 160 A Farewell to Arms 67 Hemisphere: An Australian Asian Magazine (periodical) 221 Henaway, Janeese 171, 177 ‘Decolonising Reading: The Murri Book Club’ 171, 177 Henderson, Margaret 241, 265 Hennessey, J.D. 367, 370 An Australian Bush Track 367 Henning, Rachel 25, 28–9, 31 The Herald (periodical) 166, 216 Herbert, Xavier 301 Capricornia 301 Here Comes the Nigger 93 Hergenhan, Laurie T. 1–2, 68, 101 ‘Parents “Uninformed” on Sexy Books’ 68 (ed.) The Penguin New Literary History of Australia 2, 101, 239 Herrero, Dolores 254, 258, 325 ‘The Phantom and Transgenerational Trauma in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well’ 325 ‘Post-Apocalypse Literature in the Age of Unrelenting Borders and Refugee Crises: Merlinda Bobis and Australian Fiction’ 254 Hetherington, Paul 340, 342 The Australian Anthology of Prose Poetry 342 Hetzl, Basil S. 219 Chance and Commitment: Memoirs of a Medical Scientist 219 Hewett, Dorothy 87–8, 90, 92–3, 183, 304, 307, 380 Bon Bons and Roses for Dolly 93 The Chapel Perilous 93 The Golden Oldies 93 The Man from Mukinupin 93 Rapunzel in Suburbia 307, 380 The Tatty Hollow Story 93 Hibberd, Jack 87, 89–94 Dimboola 91, 93 The Les Darcy Show 87 A Stretch of the Imagination 93 ‘Wanted: A Display of Shanks’ 94 hijab 193–201 Hile, Fiona 279–80 ‘Fiona Hile Reviews Lionel Fogarty’ 279–80 Hills, Lia 275 Hingston, James 215–16 The Australian Abroad on Branches from the Main Routes around the World 216 A History of Feminist Literary Criticism 241 Hodge, Bob 320 Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture 320

426

Index Hodgman, Helen 307 Blue Skies 307 Hogan, J.F. 370 The Lost Explorer 370 Hogan, Paul 19 Holland-Batt, Sarah 109 Holliday, Mary 209 Open Season for Fury 209 Holloway, Peter 78, 81, 90, 94 (ed.) Contemporary Australian Drama: Perspectives since 1955 78, 81, 94 Holmes, Katie 238 Spaces in her Day 238 Holocaust 4, 182, 194, 302 Holt, Harold 108, 356 Holt, L.K. 340 The Home (periodical) 54–61, 184 Home Sweet Home 396 Homer 156, 299–300 Homicide 395–7 homophobia 86, 344, 347–8, 350 Hood, Ken 63 ‘Books and the “Moral Landslide”’ 63 hooks, bell 174, 196 Black Looks: Race and Representation 196 Hooper, Chloe 388 Hooton, Joy (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 367 Hope, A.D. 113, 138, 205, 209–10 Hopgood, Alan 92, 398 Hopkins, Francis Rawdon Chesney 223 Reaping the Whirlwind: An Australian Patriotic Drama for Australian People 223 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 280 Hopkinson, Simon 92 Horejes, Thomas P. ‘deaf/Deaf: Origins and Usage’ 245 Horkheimer, Max 315–16, 319, 321 Dialectic of Enlightenment 315 Horne, Colin J. 166 Horne, Donald 240 The Lucky Country 240 Hornung, Eva 283 Dog Boy 283, 287 Horrocks, Ingrid 360 ‘Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms’ 360 Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 360 Hospital, Janette Turner 208, 211, 221, 307 The Ivory Swing 208, 221 Howard, John 108, 255, 311 Howie, Linsey 173 Hu, Wenzhong 206 A Selection of Australian Short Stories 206 Hu, Yifeng 206 ‘The Oceanic Literature Research Institute, Anhui University, China’ 205

Hua, Yan 207 Critique of Colonialism: Historical and Cultural Imprints on Australian Fiction 207 Huang, Yuanshen 206 A History of Australian Literature 206 Selected Readings in Australian Literature 206 Huggan, Graham 3, 148 Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism 3 Huggins, Jackie 237 Auntie Rita 237 Hughes, Richard 219 Hughes, Robert 102 The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 102 Hughes, William 377 Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony 172, 293, 299, 325 ‘Farm Novel or Station Romance? The Geraldton Novels of Randolph Stow’ 299 Paper Nation: The Story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, 1886–1888 293 Hugo, Victor 14 Les Miserables 14 Hume, Fergus 204, 386, 402 The Mystery of the Hansom Cab 402 Humphries, Barry 85–6, 88, 91–2, 97 My Gorgeous Life: An Adventure 86 My Life as Me: A Memoir 85 Neglected Poems 85 Hungerford, T.A.G. 221 Sowers of the Wind 221 Hunter, Ian 320 ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Studies’ 320 Huon, Jess 224 The Dark Wet 224 Hurley, Michael 240–1 Huston, John 403 Heaven Knows, Mr Allison 403 Hutcheon, Linda 105, 401 A Theory of Adaptation 401 Hutchinson, George 92 Hutchinson, Robyn 200 Huxley, Aldous 57, 189 Brave New World 189 Huyssen, Andreas 143, 187 After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. 143 ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalising World’ 187 Hübener, Gustav 167 ‘Australian Literature: A Comparative Survey’ 167 ‘How I Came to Study Australian Literature’ 167 I Found God in Soviet Russia 67 Iffland, Katrina. 167 The Ilex Tree 223 Illustrated Family Bible 14 Indigenous 5, 27, 31, 108, 112–13, 174, 177, 183, 185–6, 188–90, 204, 207, 211, 229–30, 232–3,

427

Index 235, 237–9, 241, 274–5, 278–80, 292–3, 296–7, 300, 306, 318, 328, 330, 336–8, 340, 355, 357, 369, 370, 375–6, 379–80, 385, 390, 406 authors 186, 231 culture 27, 188–9, 203, 231, 233, 355, 374–5 fauna 380 language 375–6 modernism 185–6 narratives 374–7, 379, 380, 381 people 31, 112, 188, 230–1, 274, 278–9, 292, 302, 325, 328, 336, 338, 375, 379–80, 388 writers 112, 128, 168, 186, 190, 275, 301, 355 Inglis, James (Rajah) 218 Tent Life in Tigerland 218 Inglis Moore, Tom 139, 167 Inglis, Rob 90 Inside Story (periodical) 397 International Research in Children’s Literature 119 Invincible Press 365 Irigaray, Luce 238, 262 ‘One Does Not Move Without the Other’ 238 Speculum of the Other Woman 262 Irwin, Steve 19 Islam 193–201, 275, 278 Islamiyah, Jemaah 200 Islamophobia 193, 196, 199 Island (periodical) 140–1 Ison, Jess 346 van Itallie, Jean-Claude 89 America Hurrah! 89 Jacka, Elizabeth 396–7 (ed.) Australian Television History 397 Jacklin, Michael 254, 256 ‘Detention, Displacement and Dissent in Recent Australian Life Writing’ 254, 256 Jackman, Hugh 19 Jackson, Andy 340 Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold 340 Jackson, Sally 402 ‘Like Boils the Cinématographe Tends to Break Out – The Films of the 1896 Melbourne Cup: The Lawn Near the Bandstand’ 402 Jacobs, Joseph 374 Jacobs, Lyn 240 Against the Grain: Beverley Farmer’s Writing 240 Jacobson, Lisa 340 The Sunlit Zone 340 Jagose, Anne Marie 241 Queer Theory: An Introduction 241 Jain, Jasbir 209 Jaivin, Linda 238, 321–2 The Infernal Optimist 322 James, Andrea 300 Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country 300 James, Clive 341, 396 Jameson, Storm 61 That Was Yesterday 61

Jamison, Leslie 350 Janus 398 Jardine, Walter 55 Jarrell, Randall 137 Jarry, Alfred 79 Ubu Roi 79 The Jazz Singer 402 Jeffrey, Betty 218 White Coolies 218 Jenkins, Elwyn 378 ‘Adult Agendas in Publishing South African Folktales for Children’ 378 Jenkins, Fiona 282 Jenkins, Michael 402 Jennings, Kate 224, 236 ‘Moratorium: Front Lawn: 1970’ 224 (ed.) Mother, I’m Rooted 236 Jervis-Read, Jane 87 Jindabyne 409 Jindyworobak 185, 187, 298 Jindyworobak Anthologies 297 Johnson, C.N. 41 Johnson, Clare 355 ‘Crossing the Border: Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux’ 355 Johnson, Heather Taylor 340 (ed.) Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain 340 Johnson, Judy 340 Johnson, Murray 328 Johnson, Susan 143 Johnson-Woods, Toni 365–6 ‘1980: Romancing Australia – Master of Uluru’ 365 ‘Crikey it’s a Bromance: A History of Australian Pulp Westerns’ 366 Johnston, George 216–17, 220, 304, 306–7, 317–18, 320 Journey through Tomorrow 216–17 My Brother Jack 67, 306–7, 318 Joh’s Jury 398 Jolley, Elizabeth 101, 138, 140, 142, 204, 211, 239–40, 307, 325–6, 330 The Orchard Thieves 326 Palomino 138 The Sugar Mother 101 The Well 325–6 Jones, Barry 86 Jones, Emma 341 Jones, Gail 108, 204, 206 Five Bells 108 Jones, Ian 398 Jones, Jill 307, 341 Jones, Ross L. 48–9 ‘Removing Some of the Dust from the Wheels of Civilisation: William Ernest Jones and the 1928 Commonwealth Survey of Mental Deficiency’ 48 Jordan, Deborah 185

428

Index ‘“Elusive as the Fires That Generate New Forms and Methods of Expression in Every Age and Country”: Nettie Palmer and the Modernist Short Story’ 185 Jordan, June 199 ‘Report from the Bahamas’ 199 Jordan, Toni 118 Addition 118 Jorden, Edward 198 The Suffocation of the Mother 198 Jose, Nicholas 204, 206, 221–2, 224 Avenue of Eternal Peace 206 Bapo 224 (ed.) The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature 366 The Red Thread 222 The Journal of Australian Cultural History (periodical) 397 The Journal of Australian Studies (periodical) 210 The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (periodical) 371 The Journal of the Anthropological Society (periodical) 375 The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature ( JASAL) (periodical) 119 Joyce, James 166, 187 Ulysses 187 Joyner, Rona 66, 69, 71–2 ‘Immoral Books in High School, Too’ 69 Junius 137 ‘New Books’ 137 Jury, Charles Rischbieth 163 ‘The Sun in Servitude’ 163 Jusef, Arthur 56 ‘Winifred Shaw, Australia’s Youngest Poet’ 56 Kaf ka, Franz 111, 282, 353 Kane, Paul 245, 324 Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity 245 ‘Wright and Silence’ in Australian Poetry’ 245 Kankahainen, Nicholas 245–6, 250 ‘Refiguring the Silence of the Euro-Australian Landscapes’ 245–6 The Rupture of Silence: Judith Wright’s Refiguration of Australian Colonial Silence 245 Kant, Immanuel 259, 263, 270 Critique of Judgement 259 Kaplan, Caren 359 Kaplan, Gisela 48 Kartinyeri, Doris 237 Kick the Tin 237 Kath and Kim 349, 397 Kath Walker in China 223 Kaufman, Tina 405 Wake in Fright 405 Kavan, Anna 263 Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories 263 Keates, Carmen Leigh 339

Keating, Paul 86, 113, 237 Keen, Suzanne 173 Empathy and the Novel 173 Keesing, Nancy 144 Kefala, Antigone 134, 136 Kellman, Steven 408 ‘The Cinematic Novel: Tracking a Concept’ 408 Kelly, George 119 Kelly, Ned 102 Kelly, Veronica 184 ‘Introduction’ (Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s) 184 Kendall, Henry 294–6, 298, 316 ‘Bell-birds’ 295 Keneally, Thomas 155, 157–60, 204, 206, 211, 254–5, 258, 404–5 (ed.) Another Country 158 The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith 405 (ed.) A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers 254–5, 258 Schindler’s Ark 404 Kenna, Peter 92 Kent, Hannah 380 The Good People 380 The Kenyon Review (periodical) 342 Kerr, David 210 Kerr, Deborah 404 Kerr, Heather 238 The Space Between: Australian Women Write Fictocriticism 238 Khoo, Tseen 237 The Kid Stakes 403 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie 284 Whitman’s Poetry of the Body 284 Kincaid, Jamaica 199 A Small Place 199 King, Michael 353, 362 Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame 353, 362 Kingsley, Henry 12, 367 The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn 368 Kingston, Beverley 235 My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann 235 Kingswood Country 396, 397 Kinnane, Garry 304 Kinsella, John 109, 209–10, 324, 330, 337 Graphology Poems 337 ‘Graphology Spectre 20: Agonist Voting Patterns’ 109 Jam Tree Gully 337 On the Outskirts 337 The Silo 209 Kippax, Harold 77–8, 80 Kirkpatrick, Peter 185, 397 ‘Jindy Modernist: The Jindyworobaks as Avant Garde’ 185 Serious Frolic 397 Klemperer, Viktor 109

429

Index Kneen, Krissy 380 The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen 380 Knight, Andrew 398 Knight, Anne 63, 66–7, 70, 72 ‘Always on a Thursday with Anne Knight’ 63, 66–7, 70, 72 Kocan, Peter 118 The Cure 118 The Treatment 118 Koch, Christopher 208, 221, 406 Across the Sea Wall 208 The Year of Living Dangerously 221, 406 Koetsveld, Graeme 398 Kohn, Rachel 278, 280 ‘Tim Winton’s Faith’ 278, 280 Kotcheff, Ted 405 Koval, Ramona 166 ‘The State of Australian Literature at Our Universities’ 166 Kramer, Leonie 26, 205–6 ‘Gordon, Adam Lindsay (1833–1870)’ 26 The Oxford History of Australian Literature 101, 205–6 van Krieken, Robert 160 Kristeva, Julia 239, 265 Kroll, Jeri 224 Indian Movies 224 Krug, Nora 1 ‘Maggie Smith and the Poem that Captured the Mood of a Tumultuous Year’ 1 Kruse, Axel 78, 81 ‘Patrick White’s Later Plays’ 78, 81 Kulperger, Shelley 327 ‘Familiar Ghosts: Feminist Postcolonial Gothic in Canada’ 327 Kuttainen, Victoria 54, 347 ‘The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir’ 347 The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity 54 Lacan, Jacques 254 Le Séminaire livre XIX: ... ou pire, 1971–72 254 Laguna, Sofie 114 The Choke 114 Lake, Marilyn 239 Lal, P. 209 Lallo, Michael 345, 349 ‘Marriage Equality: Magda Szubanski’s Crucial Role in Yes Victory’ 345, 349 Lamb, Karen 240 Lamond, Julieanne 58, 126–7, 134, 142–3, 168 ‘2017 Stella Count Analysis’ 142 ‘The Anglo-Australian: Between Colony and Metropolis in Rosa Praed’s The Right Honourable and Policy and Passion’ 134

‘Believing in Fairies: The Good People by Hannah Kent’ 127 ‘A Fool’s Game? On Gender and Literary Value’ 163 ‘Literary Prizes and Book Reviews in Australia since 2014’ 143 ‘Stella vs Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia’ 4, 135, 142–4, 149–52, 241 ‘Taking the Measure of Gender Disparity in Australian Book Reviewing as a Field, 1985 and 2013’ 143 ‘This is Not a Book Review: Women, the Middlebrow and the Sydney Review of Books’ 126 Lanagan, Margo 380 Sea Hearts 380 Tender Morsels 380 Landry, Donna 35 Landseer, Edwin (Sir) 37–8 The Dying Stag 37 The Hunting of Chevy Chase 37 Lane, Richard 398 Lane, William 222, 312 White or Yellow? A Story of the Race War of AD 1908 222 Lang, Andrew 374–6 (ed.) The Brown Fairy Book 375 Lang, John George 208, 220, 385 ‘The Ghost Upon the Rail’ 385 Will He Marry Her? 220 Lang, Leonora 375 Langford Ginibi, Ruby 104, 237, 355 Don’t Take Your Love to Town 104, 237 My Bundjalung People 355 Langford, John Dunmore 223 Poems Sacred and Secular 223 ‘To the Commodore of the Russian Squadron’ 223 Langley, Eve 236 Langton, Marcia 27 Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia 27 Larkin, John 89 ‘Headed for a 4-Letter Paradise’ 89 larrikin 18–24, 87, 91, 141, 217 The Last Bastion 398 The Last Outlaw 398 Laurie, Victoria 157 Lawler, Ray 88, 92 The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 67, 88 Lawrence, Anthony 337–8, 404 Lawrence, D.H. 114, 137, 187, 189, 317, 337 Kangaroo 68, 114, 189 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 189 The Plumed Serpent 187 Lawson, Henry 5, 10–12, 15–16, 25–6, 31, 135, 205–8, 222–3, 297, 306, 324 ‘Booth’s Drum’ 223

430

Index ‘Borderland’ 26 ‘The Drover’s Wife’ 26 ‘In a Dry Season’ 297 ‘Preface’ (My Brilliant Career) 16 ‘“Pursuing Literature” in Australia’ 11 ‘Up the Country’ 297 Lawson, Louisa 26, 235 Lawson, Sylvia 235 The Archibald Paradox 235 Lazaroo, Simone 237 Lazreg, Marnia 196 Le Dœuff, Michèle 138 Le, Nam 108, 223, 254, 258 The Boat 223, 254, 258 Lea, Bronwyn 335, 340 ‘Australian Poetry Now’ 340 ‘Trends in Poetry Publishing: 1995–2008’ 335 Leakey, Caroline 368 Leane, Jeanine 338 Ledger, Heath 407 Lee, Bevan 398–9 A Place to Call Home 399 Lee, Jenny 140 Lee, Sarah Bowditch 38 Lee, Sophie 322 Lee, Tom 308 Coach Fitz 308 Lee-Jones, Nancy 103 ‘Rev. Olga Masters’s Loving Daughters’ 103 Lefebvre, Henri 314–17, 319 Critique of Everyday Life 315–17 la vie quotidienne 314 Lefever, Kelly 398 Lehman, Geoffrey 223 ‘Emperor Mao and the Sparrows’ 223 Lehmann, Rosamond 61 LeHunte, Bem 209 The Seduction of Silence 209 There Where the Pepper Grows 209 Leichardt, Ludwig 228 Leigh, Janet 404 Leigh, Julia 325, 328–30, 407 The Hunter 328–30, 407 Leishman, Kirsty 265 ‘Australian Grunge Literature and the Conflict between Literary Generations’ 265 Lennox, Marion 366 Lesson, Luka 340 Lette, Kathy 406 Puberty Blues 406 Lever, Susan 239–40, 265–6, 270, 397 The Oxford Book of Australian Women’s Verse 240 Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction 239 Levine, Lawrence W. 156 Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America 156 Levy, Bronwen 138, 142, 326

‘Constructing the Woman Writer: The Reviewing Reception of Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus’ 138 ‘Qualitative Methods? Reading Recent Australian Women’s Fiction’ 142 Lewinski, Monica 284 Ley, James 127, 129, 131 The Medusa vs the Odalisque 131 LGBT (LBGTIQA+) 95, 113, 347–8 Lhuede, Elizabeth 366 ‘Australian Romance Writing – What’s There to Take Seriously?’ 365 Li, Isobel 223 Chinese Affair 223 Liebich, Susann 54 The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity 54 The Lifted Brow (periodical) 131, 346 Liminal Magazine (periodical) 339 Lindsay, Elaine 274 Lindsay, Jack 306 Lindsay, Joan 227, 405 Picnic at Hanging Rock 227, 405 Lindsay, Lionel 58 Lindsay, Norman 61, 403 The Magic Pudding 61, 403 LINQ (periodical) 119, 167, 241 Literary Criterion (periodical) 209 Little, Ben 347 ‘Stand-Up Comedy’ 347 Littlejohn, Agnes 223 The Breath of India and Other Stories 223 Livermore, Reg 88, 92 Llewellyn, Kate 240 (ed.) Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets 240 Locke, Kara 149 Lofting, Hilary 55 Lohrey, Amanda 139–42 ‘The Dead Hand of Orthodoxy’ 142 ‘The Liberated Heroine: New Varieties of Defeat?’ 139 ‘“Rhine Journey” and the Political Unconscious’ 139 Lokugé, Chandani 209, 256 If the Moon Smiled 209 ‘Mediating Literary Borders: Sri Lankan Writing in Australia’ 256 London Aphrodite (periodical) 189 London, Jack 56–7, 189 The London Review of Books (periodical) 143 Lonely Planet 218 Long, Elizabeth 173 Longford, Raymond 403 Lorange, Astrid 341 Lord of the Flies 66–7 Lorrain, Claude 294 The Los Angeles Review of Books (periodical) 129

431

Index Lower, Lennie 306 Here’s Luck 306 Lucashenko, Melissa 112, 148, 231, 233, 237, 306–7 ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’ 231 Mullumbimby 112, 231 Steam Pigs 306–7 Too Much Lip 112, 231 Luckhurst, Roger 388 Lukes, Steven 94 The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method 94 Lycett, Joseph 295 Lyell, Lottie 403 Lyons, Martyn 10–11 ‘Britain’s Largest Export Market’ 10–11 Lyotard, Jean-François 259 M/C Journal (periodical) 397 Mabel (periodical) 236 Mabo 230, 274, 292–3, 296, 302 McAleer, Joseph 365–6 Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon 365–6 McAlister, Jody 117–18 ‘“Feelings Like the Women in Books”: Declarations of Love in Australian Romance Novels, 1859–1891’ 117–18 McArdle, Keith 222 The Reckoning: The Day Australia Fell 222 McArthur, Kathleen 244 Macaulay, Rose 60 McAuley, James 186, 275 Macauley, Wayne 307 Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe 307 McCallum, John 76–7, 87 MacCallum, Mungo 168 ‘Draft of a Speech’ 168 McCann, A.L.; see also McCann, Andrew McCann, Andrew 128, 304, 306, 307 ‘How to Fuck a Tuscan Garden: A Note on Literary Pessimism’ 128 Subtopia 306–7 McCarthy, Birdie 67 McCarthy, Mary The Group 66–8 McCooey, David 308, 339, 341 ‘Contemporary Australian Poetry’ 341 Outside 308 Star Struck 308 ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’ 341 McCourt, Suzanne 227 The Lost Child 227 McCrae, Hugh 55–6, 204, 223 The Mimshi Maiden 223 McCredden, Lyn 321 McCrum, Mark 355–6 No Worries: A Journey through Australia 356

McCubbin, Frederick 40 Lost 40 McCullough, Colleen 118, 207, 406 An Indecent Obsession 406 On, Off 118 The Thorn Birds 207, 208 McDonald, Damian 307 Luck in the Greater West 307 Macdonald, Marion 396 McDonald, Nan 144 Macdonald, Sarah 211 Holy Cow 211 McEllroy, Colleen 199 A Long Way from St Louie 199 McFarlane, Brian 397 Words and Images: Australian Novels into Film 397 McFarlane, Ian 328 McGahan, Andrew 238, 321, 325–7, 330 Underground 321 The White Earth 327–8 McGrath, Ann 239 McGregor, Fiona 238, 240 Machen, Arthur 385 ‘The White People’ 385 Macintyre, Stuart 27, 99–100 The History Wars 27, 99–100 Mack, Mary 57 Mackaness, George 166 MacKay, Kenneth 222 The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia 222 McKay, Robert 282 ‘What Kind of Literary Animal Studies Do We Want, Or Need?’ 282 McKay, Susan 160 ‘Personalising Current Affairs without Becoming Tabloid: The Case of Australian Story’ 160 McKee, Alan 156, 394, 396–7 Australian Television: A Genealogy of Great Moments 396–7 ‘Defining Entertainment: An Approach’ 156 ‘What is Television For?’ 394 Mackellar, Dorothea 301–2 ‘My Country’ 301–2 McKeown, Deidre 345 ‘Chronology of Same-Sex Marriage Bills Introduced into the Federal Parliament: A Quick Guide’ 345 McKern, Leo 403 McKernan, Susan 141 Mackey, Kevin 264 Cure: Recollections of an Addict 264 McKie, David 397 ‘An ABC of Australian Sitcoms: British Influences, Middle Class Mores and Boutique Quality’ 397 McKie, Ronald 405 Mackintosh, Cameron 405

432

Index McLaren, John D. 59–60 McLean, Ian 183, 186 ‘Modernism and the Art of Albert Namatjira’ 183, 186 McMahon, Bill 68 MacMahon, Charles 402 McMahon, David 209 Vegemite Vindaloo 209 McMahon, Elizabeth 259 ‘Encapsulated Space: The Paradise-Prison of Australia’s Island Imaginary’ 259 McMahon, Neil 349 McMaster, Rhyll 168, 340 McNamara, Andrew 184 ‘Introduction’ (Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917–1967) 184 McNamara, James 399 McNamara, Marygai 140 (ed.) Eclipsed: Two Centuries of Australian Women’s Fiction 140 McNeer, Rebecca 3–4 (ed.) A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900 3 McNeil, Jim 91–3 The Chocolate Frog 91 How Does Your Garden Grow? 91, 93 Jack 91 Macquarie, Arthur 15 McQueen, Humphrey 102, 219 A New Britannia 102 Tokyo World: An Australian Diary 219 McWilliam, Kelly 366 Mad Men 399 Magarey, Susan 236, 367 Mager, Stefan 89 Mahapatra, Jayanta 209 Mahony, Frank P. 40 Mahyuddin, Jan 140, 237 (ed.) Beyond the Echo: Multicultural Women’s Writing 237 Maiden, Jennifer 341 Maling, Caitlin 338 Fish Song 338 Mallarmé, Stéphane 233, 342 Malouf, David 12, 105, 206, 211, 227, 304, 306–7, 319–21, 324, 338 Fly Away Peter 105 ‘Introduction’ (Such is Life) 12 Johnno 306–7, 319, 321 Remembering Babylon 227 Man Booker 148–9, 159–61, 211 The Man from Snowy River 403, 409 Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) 65, 71 Mander, Jane 56–7 The Mango Tree 405 Manning Clark’s History of Australia: The Musical 101 Mannion, Stephen 190

Mao, Douglas, 183, 185 ‘The New Modernist Studies’ 183 Mares 256 Marion 398 Marks de Marques, Eduardo 106 Around 1988: History and/as Fiction and the Australian Bicentenary 106 Marr, David 75–7, 80–1 Patrick White: A Life 76–7, 80–1 ‘Patrick White: The Final Chapter’ 80 Marriage Amendment Act 345, 361 Marriage Equality Bill 350 Marryat, Emilia; see also Norris, Marryat Emilia Jack Stanley; or, the Young Adventurers 38 Marryat, Frederick 38 Marsden, John 222 Tomorrow When the War Began 222 Martin, Catherine 10, 236, 369 An Australian Girl 369 The Silent Sea 10–11 Martin, Emily 198 Martin, Kelrick Karroyul 390 Martin, Susan K. (Sue) 372 ‘Outback Fever: The Romance of Rural and National Literary Identity in a Networked World’ 328, 372 ‘The State of Australian Literature at Our Universities’ 166 Mary Poppins Returns 405 Mascara Literary Review (periodical) 131, 339 Massey, Doreen 359 ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’ 359 Masters, Olga 101–3 Amy’s Children 102–3 Loving Daughters 102–3 Mateer, John 224 Southern Barbarians 224 Mathur, Malati 210 Matthews, Brian 140 Matthews, Jill Julius 188 Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity 188 Matthews, Sam 51 Maxwell, Anne 119 ‘Education, Literature and the Emotions: A Salute to Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher’ 119 Mbembe, Achille 258 McPhee Gribble 140, 236 Mead, Philip 184, 209, 247 Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry 247 Meanjin/Papers/Quarterly (periodical) 76, 119, 129, 131, 136, 140–1, 167, 181, 241, 297, 345 Media Tropes 119 MeJane (periodical) 236

433

Index Menzies, Robert 90, 217, 219 Menzies-Pike, Catriona 186 ‘Writing, Editing: An Interview with Ellen van Neerven’ 186 Mercer, Gina 135, 140 The Mercury (periodical) 166–7, 398 Mernissi, Fatema 196, 201 Merrill, Miles 340 The Metro (periodical) 397 Meyer, Angela 118 A Superior Spectre 118 Meyrick, Julian 75, 77, 87–9 Australian Theatre After the New Wave: Policy, Subsidy and the Alternative Artist 87 See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave 87–9 Michell, Keith 75–6, 78 middle-class 19–24, 49, 55, 67, 79, 87, 105, 136–7, 195, 258, 305, 318, 338, 356 Middleton, Kate 340 Miles Franklin Literary Award 136, 148–51, 161, 168, 177, 231, 307–8, 391, 406 Miles, T.A. 35 ‘D’ye Ken John Peel?’ 35 Milgate, Rodney 90 Miller, Alex 177, 206, 221 The Ancestor Game 206, 221 Landscape of Farewell 177 Miller, George T. 403 Les Patterson Saves the World 85–7 Miller, Harry M. 89–90, 407 Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed.) Le Séminaire livre XIX: ... ou pire, 1971–72 254 Miller, Kelsey 87 ‘The Ruling in this Friends Lawsuit Set Back the #MeToo Movement by Years – Now the Woman at the Centre of it Speaks Out’ 87 Millett, Andrew 165–6 ‘Chair of Australian Literature’ 165 Millett, Kate 239 Sexual Politics 239 Mills and Boon 138, 365–6, 368, 371 Mills, John 404 Milne, Geoffrey 93 Theatre Australia (Un)Limited: Australian Theatre since the 1950s 93 Milton, John 233, 299 Minichiello, Victor 87 (ed.) AIDS in Australia: Context and Practice 87 Minogue, Kylie 322 Minter, Peter 337 Mirmohamadi, Kylie 372 Misto, John 398 Mitchel, John 41 Jail Journal; or, Five Years in British Prisons 41 Mitchell, Elyne 298 Mitchell, Mary 58 Mitchum, Robert 404

modernism 47–8, 51, 54–5, 107, 109, 182–90, 206–7, 233, 299–300, 317, 319 Modjeska, Drusilla 14, 102, 235–6, 240 Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers, 1925–1945 14, 235 Moffit, Ian 219 Deadlines 219 Moir, Alan 65 Molony, John 101 The Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia: The Story of 200 Years 101 Montgomery, Alex 15 The Monthly (periodical) 129 Moore, Deirdre 166 ‘Cultural Cringe in Academe: Studying Literature in the 1940s’ 166 Moore, George 14 Moore, Nicole 3, 189 The Censor’s Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia’s Banned Books 189 (ed.) Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature 3 Moorhouse, Frank 406 ‘The Americans, Baby’ 406 The Coca-Cola Kid 406 ‘The Electrical Experience’ 406 ‘The Everlasting Secret Family’ 406 Moran, Albert 395, 402–3, 405–6 A Country Practice: ‘Quality Soap.’ 395 Historical Dictionary of Australian and New Zealand Cinema 402–3, 405–6 Images and Industry: Television Drama Production in Australia 395 Making a TV Series: The Bellamy Project 395 Moran’s Guide to Australian TV Series 395 Moran, James 184 ‘Introduction’ (Regional Modernisms) 184 Moran, Joe 156, 161, 395 ‘The Reign of Hype: The Contemporary (Literary) Star System’ 156, 161 Morand, Paul 60 Lewis and Irene 60 Morecroft, Eleanor 54, 61 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 237–8 Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism 237 Morgan, Sally 104, 209, 211, 237–8, 355 My Place 104, 209, 237 Morphett, Tony 398 Morris, Jan 356 Journeys 356 Morris, Linda ‘After 50 Years, Writer Tom Keneally Takes a Bow’ 159 Morris, Lulu 328 ‘The Last Indigenous Tasmanian’ 328 Morris, Meaghan 238 Morris Miller, E. 166

434

Index Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935: A Descriptive and Bibliographical Survey of Books by Australian Authors in Poetry, Drama, Fiction, Criticism and Anthology with Subsidiary Entries to 1938 166 Morris, Myra 55 Morris, William 12 News from Nowhere 12 Morrison, Fiona 51, 137 ‘Modernist/Provincial/Pacific: Katherine Mansfield, Christina Stead and Expatriate Home Ground’ 51 Morrison, George Ernest 216 An Australian in China: Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma 216 Morrison, Scott 108, 113–14 Morrison, Toni 390 Morrissey, Di 372 Mortimer, Caleb 57 Morton, Kate 204 The Shifting Fog 204 Mosaic (periodical) 209 Mother and Son 397–8 Mudiyanselage, Kumarasinghe Dissanayake 118 ‘Encouraging Empathy through Picture Books about Migration’ 118 Mudrooroo 104, 211, 324 Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World 104 Muecke, Stephen 238, 292, 300 Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy 300 Muir, Marcie 376 My Bush Book: K. Langloh Parker’s 1890s Story of Outback Station Life 376 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 209 Mulcaire, Terry 284 ‘Intimacy in Leaves of Grass’ 284 multiculturalism 99–101, 108, 112–13, 199, 203, 207, 239, 257–8, 304, 310, 388 Mulvey, Laura 196 Munnery, Kerry 327 The Mirror House: Writing the Uncanny into the Australian Suburban Home. 327 Munro, Alice 389 Munro, Don 89 Murdoch, Walter 164–5 Murnane, Gerald 136, 304, 306–8 Landscape with Landscape 307 A Lifetime on Clouds 307 A Season on Earth 308 Murray, Les 208, 223, 275–7, 336–7, 339 ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’ 277 ‘The Antipodes of India’ 224 ‘On Sitting Back and Thinking About Porter’s Boeotia’ 336 The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose 336 The Peasant Mandarin: Prose Pieces 336

Poems the Size of Photographs 224 ‘Poetry and Religion’ 276 ‘Young General Macarthur in a Coonskin Coat’ 223 Murray, Scott 395 Australia on the Small Screen 1970–1995: The Complete Guide to Telefeatures and Miniseries 395 Murray, Simone 161 The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation 161 Musa, Omar 308, 340 Here Come the Dogs 308 My Army, O, My Army! and Other Songs 223 My Name’s McGooley, What’s Yours? 396, 398 Myall Creek Massacre 27 Myers, D.G. 126 Nabizadeh, Golnar 254 ‘Comics Online: Detention and White Space in “A Guard’s Story”’ 254 Nabokov, Vladimir 72 Lolita 63, 66–7, 72 Nagel, William 218 The Odd Angry Shot 218 Najmabadi, Afsana 196 Namatjira, Albert 183, 186, 300 Nanni, Giordano 300 Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country 300 Narasimhaiah, C.D. 209 Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry 209 Narayan, R.K. 209 Narayan, Shyamala 209 National Book Award 149 Natt, Hilaire 397 ‘An ABC of Australian Sitcoms: British Influences, Middle Class Mores and Boutique Quality’ 397 Nayar, Pramod K. 210 Neave, Lucy Ann 287 van Neerven, Ellen 186, 338, 342 Comfort Food 338 Neeson, Liam 404 Neighbour, Sally 200 The Mother of Mohammed: An Australian Woman’s Extraordinary Journey into Jihad 200 Neighbours 356, 395–6 Neill, Sam 350, 402 Neilson, Shaw 209 Nelson, Alice 110–12 The Children’s House 110 Neruda, Pablo 342 The Book of Questions 342 Neshat, Shirin 196 Women of Allah 196 Nettelbeck, Amanda 238 The Space Between: Australian Women Write Fictocriticism 238 Neumann, Klaus 258–9

435

Index ‘“Thinking the Forbidden Concept”: Refugees as Immigrants and Exiles’ 258 Neville, Richard 114, 218 Hippy Hippy Shake 218 Nevin, Robyn 80 The New Republic (periodical) 181 New South Wales 14, 27, 31, 34, 37, 41, 49, 90, 95, 102–3, 106, 117, 210, 218, 232, 294–5, 297, 336, 338, 402 New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (periodical) 119 The New York Review of Books (periodical) 143 The New York Times (periodical) 137 The New York Times Book Review (periodical) 152 The New Yorker (periodical) 137 New Zealand 3, 57–8, 67, 182–3, 186, 190, 193, 210, 339, 353, 360, 362–3, 387 Newton, Pamela 118 ‘Beyond the Sensation Novel: Social Crime Fiction and Qualia of the Real World’ 118 Nguyen, Mimi Thi 195 Niall, Brenda 19, 21 Seven Little Billabongs: The World of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce 19 Nicholls, Glenn 257 Nichols, Claire 87 Nietzsche, Friedrich 318 ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’ 298 Night of the Lepus 404 Nikro, Norman Saadi 327–8 Niland, D’Arcy 404 Nile, Richard 11, 209 ‘The “Paternoster Row Machine” and the Australian Book Trade, 1890–1945’ 11 Nisbet, Hume 386 Nix, Garth 211 No Regrets Cooperative 140, 236 Nobel Prize in Literature 206, 305, 366 Nocella, Anthony J. 251 Nolan, Marguerite (Maggie) 171, 177 ‘Book Clubs and Reconciliation: A Pilot Study on Book Clubs Reading the Fictions of Reconciliation’ 171 ‘Book Clubs, Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, and the Ordinary Reader’ 171 ‘Decolonising Reading: The Murri Book Club’ 171, 177 ‘Reading Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance: Book Clubs and Postcolonial Literary Theory’ 171, 177 ‘Reading Massacre: Book Club Responses to Landscape of Farewell’ 171, 177 Nolan, Sybil 130 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo 134, 139, 211, 223, 237, 275, 279, 300–1, 324; see also Kath Walker ‘Bora Ring’ 279 ‘Peasant Painters’ 223 ‘Tian An Men Square’ 223

Norris, Adam 79 ‘Why The Ham Funeral Remains Relevant in Australian Theatre, 70 Years Later’ 79 Norris, Emilia Marryat 38; see also Marryat, Emilia Norris, Frank 56 Norris, Sharon 147–8 Nowra, Louis 87, 92–3 Albert Names Edward 93 Inner Voices 93 Visions 87, 93 Noyce, Philip 370, 407 Rabbit-Proof Fence 370 Nuna, Sheel 210 Nussbaum, Martha 173–4 Oakes, Russel 223 As Enduring as the Camphor Tree 223 Oakley, Barry 92 O’Brien, Kate 61 Without My Cloak 61 Oceania (periodical) 298 Oceanic Literary Studies (periodical) 206 O’Connor, Elizabeth 405 The Irishman 405 Of Sadhus and Spinners 209 Offenburg, Kurt 55 Offspring 398 The Old Man and the Sea 67 Olivier, Lawrence 404 Olsson, Kristina 357 The China Garden 357 Shell 357 Olubas, Brigitta 240 Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist 240 Ommundsen, Wenche 254–5, 259 ‘“This Story Does Not Begin on a Boat”: What is Australian about Asian Australian Writing?’ 254–5 O’Neill, Rosemary 166 ‘Universities Cold Shoulder Our Literature’ 166 Oodgeroo see Noonuccal O’Regan, Tom 394 Australian National Cinema 394 Australian Television Culture 394 O’Reilly, Nathanael 3 Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel 305–6 (ed.) Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature 3 Organ, Michael K. 377 Orwell, George 219 Osborne, Roger 182 Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s 182 Oswald, Debra 398 Oswy, Dave 163, 168 otosclerosis 243, 244, 246 Outlaw and Lawmaker 137

436

Index Ouyang, Yu 204–7, 339 ‘A Century of Oz Lit in China: A Critical Overview (1906–2008)’ 204–6 Overland (periodical) 119, 128–9, 131 Oviedo, Jose Miguel 105 Owen, Harrison 403 The Mount Marunga Mystery 403 Owen, Jan 307 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 155, 305 Packed to the Rafters 398 Page, Geoff 337, 340–1 ‘Robert Adamson Review: Autobiography at the Core of His New Poems’ 337 Page, Ruth 137 ‘The Search for Love’ 137 Pall Mall (periodical) 385 Palmer, Helen 218 Australian Teacher in China 218 Palmer, Howard 88 ‘Rev. A Cup of Tea, a Bex, and a Good Lie Down’ 88 Palmer, Jennifer 87–8 Contemporary Australian Playwrights 88 Palmer, Nettie 58, 137, 142, 144, 167, 185 ‘Fourteen Years: Extracts from a Private Journal’ 167 Palmer, Vance 26, 54, 142, 166, 184–5 ‘Novels for Men’ 142 The Passage 166 Paniker, Ayappa 209 Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature (periodical) 119 PapertalkGreen, Charmaine 337 False Claims of Colonial Thieves 337 Paranjape, Makarand 210 Parker, Katie Langloh 375–6 Australian Legendary Tales: Folklore of the Noongabarrahs as Told to the Piccaninnies 376 The Euahlayi Tribe: A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia 376 More Australian Legendary Tales 376 Parkinson 86 Parkinson, Michael 86 Parry, Catherine 282 Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction 282 Pascoe, Bruce 27, 204, 296–7 Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? 27, 296–7 Paterson, Andrew Barton (Banjo) 5, 10, 13, 25–6, 31, 219, 223, 282, 296–8, 366, 403, 409 ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ 26 ‘In Defence of the Bush: An Answer to Various Bards’ 26 ‘The Man from Snowy River’ 26, 296, 366 ‘The Pearl Diver’ 223 ‘A Reply to Various Bards’ 26

Patmore, Derek 57 Patrick, David (Dr.) 100 Patterson, John 85, 408 ‘By the Book’ 408 Patterson, Les (Sir) 85–7, 97 Patton, Simon 136 Payne, Frances (Frank) 55 Payter, Dora 55 Pedley, Ethel 40–2, 403 Dot and the Kangaroo 40–2, 403 Pender, Anne 85–6 ‘No More Please: Barry Humphries and Australian English’ 86 One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries 85 The Penny Post (periodical) 14 Peril Magazine (periodical) 339 Perkins, Rachel 407 One Night the Moon 390 Perlman, Elliot 307, 407 Three Dollars 307, 407 Perrault, Charles 379 Pesman, Ros 356–7 (ed.) The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing 357 Pessoa, Fernando 342 Petersen, Ralph 398 Pettitt, Joanne 118 ‘On Blends and Abstractions: Children’s Literature and the Mechanisms of Holocaust Representation’ 118 Pfisterer, Susan 240 Playing with Ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the Suffragettes to the Sixties 240 Tremendous Worlds: Australian Women’s Drama, 1890–1960 240 Philadelphoff-Puren, Nina 137 ‘Reading Rape in Colonial Australia: Barbara Baynton’s “The Tramp,” The Bulletin and Cultural Criticism’ 137 Phillips, A.A. 54, 164 ‘The Cultural Cringe’ 54 Phillips, Janet 255 ‘The “Pacific Solution” Revisited: A Statistical Guide to the Asylum Seeker Caseloads on Nauru and Manus Island’ 255 Phillips, Ruth B. 186 ‘Introduction: Inside Modernity: Indigeneity, Coloniality, Modernisms’ 186 (ed.) Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism 186 Phoenix 398 Pick, Anat 282 Pickett, Carolyn 240 Playing with Ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the Suffragettes to the Sixties 240 Picture Alphabet of Birds 14 Piddington, Marion 49

437

Index Pierce, Peter 1, 3, 138, 157, 266 (ed.) The Cambridge History of Australian Literature 1, 3, 266, 366 Pike, Andrew 402–3 Australian Film: 1900–1977 402–3 Pilbrow, Anupama 277 Pilkington Garimara, Doris (Nugi Garimara) 370, 407 Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 237, 370, 407 Pink Ink 240 Pinker, James 15 Pinne, Peter 92 Pinter, Harold 75 Pinto, Eugenie 210 Playford, Thomas 219 Notes of Travel in India, China and Japan 219 Plummer, David 87 (ed.) AIDS in Australia: Context and Practice 87 Plumwood, Val 287 Poe, Edgar Allan 386 The Poet (periodical) 209 Poetry (periodical) 342 Polites, Peter 304, 308 Down the Hume 308 The Pillars 308 Pollard, Rhys 218 The Cream Machine 218 Pope, Alexander 128 Pope, Robin 39 Porter, Charles 68 Porter, Dorothy 164, 239–40, 340–1, 371 The Monkey’s Mask 164, 371 Porter, Hal 221, 223 A Handful of Pennies 221 Mr Butterfly and Other Tales of New Japan 223 Porter, Peter 336, 339 ‘Country Poetry and Town Poetry: A Debate With Les Murray’ 339 ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’ 336 Porter, Sarah 38 Post, Emily 59 postcolonialism 3, 101, 113, 117, 125, 128, 186, 190, 207, 210–11, 230–1, 254, 259, 320–1, 324, 326–30, 336, 342, 354–5, 358, 369, 371, 372, 379, 381, 384, 387–9, 391 postmodernism 12, 105–6, 117, 128, 155, 207, 262, 265, 267, 341 Potter, Claire 341 Potter, Emily 327 Pouly, Marie-Pierre 147 Poussin, Nicolas 294 Powers, John 91 The Last of the Knucklemen 91 Powney, Richard 37 ‘The Stag Chace in Windsor Forest’ 37

Praed, Rosa Campbell 134, 136–7, 220, 236, 360, 370, 385–8 The Australasian 136 The Bond of Wedlock 136 ‘The Bunyip’ 375, 386 Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush 370 Madame Izan: A Tourist Story 220 Policy and Passion 136 Prendergast, Julia 118 ‘Grinding the Moor – Ideasthesia and Narrative’ 118 ‘Narrative and the Unthought Known: The Immaterial Intelligence of Form’ 118 Preston, Margaret 187–8, 297 Pretty, Ron 209 (ed.) The Road South: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, 209 Prichard, Katharine Susannah 55, 60, 167, 184, 187, 205, 207, 236 Coonardoo 60, 187, 207 The Wild Oats of Han 60 Working Bullocks 60 Priest, Joan 66, 70–2 ‘Report requested by the Quarterly General Meeting, Australian Society of Authors, 23/2/80, from the Queensland membership Vice-President on the effectiveness of the Community Standards Organisation and other pro-censorship bodies’ 66, 70–1 Priestley, J.B. 61 Prisoner 395–7 Procter, James 173 Proctor, Thea 55 The Project 349–50 Prosser, Rosslyn 238 (ed.) Mudmaps: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing 238 Proulx, Annie 389 Proust, Marcel 136, 233 The Psychology of Sex 50 Puchner 78 Pugsley, Peter 205 ‘Manufacturing the Canon: Australia in the Chinese Literary Imagination’ 205 Pullar, A.L. 222 Celestalia: A Fantasy AD 1975 222 Pulvers, Roger 92 Pung, Alice 204, 219 Close to Home 219 Growing up Asian in Australia 219 Her Father’s Daughter 219 Unpolished Gem 219 Pybus, Cassandra 141 Q&A 349–50 Quadrant (periodical) 119, 136 Quartly, Marian 239

438

Index Queensland 28, 63, 65–71, 117, 163–4, 166–7, 236–7, 244, 325–6, 338, 354, 370, 388, 402 Queensland League for National Welfare and Decency 66 Queensland Literature Board of Review 69 queer theory 240–1, 371 Quilkey, Roma 366 ‘Serial of the Snowy: Exciting Story in New Novel’ 366 Quinn, Anthony 404 Quinn, H.E. 220 That Woman from Java 220 Quinn, Roderic 204 Quintero, Ruben 86 A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern 86 Qur’an 196, 198 racism 2, 42, 51, 66, 85–6, 93, 102, 109, 112, 114, 174, 194, 229, 311–12, 318, 330, 370, 380, 406 Radcliffe, Ann 360, 385 Radha, K. 210 Radic, Leonard 92 Radic, Thérèse 223 Madame Mao 223 The Radium Terrors 220 Radway, Janice 176 A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-theMonth Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire 176 Raengo, Alessandra 408 Raja, Christopher 224 The Burning Elephant 224 Rake 398 Ram, Alur Janaki 209 Rampling, Charlotte 407 Ratcliffe, John 218 Biting Through 218 Rattigan, Neil 397 Airy Persiflage: Occasional Thoughts on Film, Television and Culture 397 Ravenscroft, Alison 174, 330 ‘Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics’ 330 The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race 174 Rawi, Mahboba 256 Mahboba’s Promise: How One Woman Made a World of Difference 256 Ray, John 63 ‘Foreword to Lolita’ 63 Readings Monthly (periodical) 129 Redfern Now 398 Redress 236 Reed, Bill 92–3 Truganinni 93 Reed-Gilbert, Kerry 338 Rees, Leslie 393

Australian Drama in the 1970s: A Historical and Critical Survey 394 The Making of Australian Drama: A Historical and Critical Survey from the 1830s to the 1970s 394 The Sub-Editor’s Room 393 Reeves, Janet 167 ‘A Love of Australian Literature’ 167 The Refinery 224 Refractory Girl (periodical) 140, 236, 238 Rega, Angela 380 ‘The Bush Bride of Badgery Hollow’ 380 Reilly, Gary 398 Reis, Elisa 48 (ed.) Worlds of Difference 48 Rendle-Short, Angel 66–8, 71–2 ‘Letter to Sister Julian’ 68 ‘Letter to the Rt. Hon. Sir Paul Hasluck,’ 68 ‘Moral Pollution: Diagnosis and Remedy’ 67, 72 ‘Sowing the Wind: Reaping the Whirlwind’ 67 Renes, Cornelis Martin. 325–6, 330 ‘Kim Scott’s Fiction within Western Australian Life-Writing: Voicing the Violence of Removal and Displacement’ 330 ‘Report requested by the Quarterly General Meeting, Australian Society of Authors, 23/2/80, from the Queensland membership Vice-President on the effectiveness of the Community Standards Organisation and other pro-censorship bodies’ (Priest, J.) 66, 70–1 The Rereaders (podcast) 131 Reynolds, Henry 27, 103 The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia 103 Rhapsody 404 Rhymes of the Mines 223 Richardson, Alan 120 ‘Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: An Introduction’ 120 Richardson, Henry Handel 56–7, 206, 236, 404–5 The Getting of Wisdom 405 Maurice Guest 56, 404 Rickard, John 21 Ricketson, Matthew 130 Ride on Stranger 398 Riemer, Andrew P. 138 Rigby, Kate 249–50 ‘Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?’ 250 Riley, Denis 223 Five Songs on Japanese Haiku: Soprano, Clarinet in A, Violincello 223 Rimbaud, Arthur 227, 234, 316, 342 Rio Grande’s Last Race and Other Verses 223 Rivett, Rohan 218 Behind Bamboo 218 Rizvi, Jamila 348–9 Roberts, Gregory David 211 Shantaram 209, 211

439

Index Roberts, Hera 55 Roberts, Tom 297 Robertson, Rachel 118 ‘“Driven by Tens”: Obsession and Cognitive Difference in Toni Jordan’s Romantic Comedy Addition’ 118 Reaching One Thousand: A Story of Love, Motherhood and Autism 118 Robinson, Della 157 ‘Unpublished interview with Thomas Keneally’ 157 Robinson, F.W. 163, 165–6 Robinson, George Augustus 104 Robinson, Marilyn 280 Rodoreda, Geoff 293, 301 The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction 293 Rodriguez, Judith 210 Roe, Jill 15, 238 ‘Miles Franklin: Bush Intellectual’ 14–15 (ed.) My Congenials 238 Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography 15 Rojek, Chris 157–9 Celebrity 157, 159 Fame Attack: The Inflation of Celebrity and its Consequences. 158 Roland, David 118 How I Rescued my Brain 118 Rollins, David 222 Rogue Element 222 Romanticism 11, 27, 138, 158, 183, 220, 222, 235, 266, 268, 284–5, 289, 293–4, 296–9, 316, 318–19, 325, 327, 337, 341, 350, 354, 356, 360, 365–9, 371–2, 406 Romeril, John 87, 89–93, 223 Bastardy 91 Chicago, Chicago 91 The Floating World 87, 91, 223 Whatever Happened to Realism? 89 Rooney, Brigid 25, 249, 304, 307, 322 Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life 322 Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity 25, 304 Roper, Myra 218 China: The Surprising Country 218 Rose, Peter 107, 131 ‘In Defence of Book Reviewers in Australia’ 131 Roddy Parr 107 Rose Scott Women Writers’ Festival 142 Rosehaven 398 Ross, Kenneth 92 Ross, Kristen 317 Roth, Phillip 136 Row, Agnes (Sister) 375–6, 381 Fairy Tales Told in the Bush 376 Rowlands, Shane 265 Rowley, Hazel 50, 52, 137 Christina Stead: A Biography 50, 52, 137

Rowley, Sue 367 Rowse, Tim 190 ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’ 190 Royalle, Candy 340, 344, 346 ‘The Battle is Far from Over’ 344 Roydhouse, Thomas 222 The Coloured Conquest 222 Rubik, Margarete 118 ‘Provocative and Unforgettable: Peter Carey’s Short Fiction’ 118 Rudd, Kevin 108 Rudd, Steele 10–11, 297, 403 On Our Selection 403 Ruddock, Philip 108, 311 Rundle, Sharon 212 (ed.) Fear Factor: Terror Incognito 212 Rusden, Heather 243–8, 250–1 ‘Interview with Judith Wright McKinney’ 244 ‘On Being Deaf ’ 243–8, 250–1 Rush, Geoffrey 407 Ruthven, Ken 239 Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction 239 Ryan, Colin 92 Ryan, Gig 307, 337, 341 ‘Catcher and Sifter: Net Needle by Robert Adamson’ 337 Ryan, Lyndall 27, 103, 328 The Aboriginal Tasmanians 103 ‘The Australian Agricultural Company, the Van Diemen’s Land Company: Labour Relations with Aboriginal Landowners, 1824–1835’ 328 Colonial Frontier Massacres Australia 27 Ryan, Marie-Laure 116 Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory 116 Ryan, Ronald 88 Said, Edward 215 Sakr, Omar 304, 308, 338 The Lost Arabs 308, 338 These Wild Houses 308 Sales, Leigh 345 ‘Hannah Gadsby: Leigh Sales was Nervous about Interviewing the Comedian. But it was “Fantastic”’ 345 Salinger, J.D. 66, 68 Catcher in the Rye 66, 68, 71 Salzman, Paul 230, 239, 264–6, 269–70, 327 After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007 230 The New Diversity: Australian Fiction, 1970–88 239, 264 Sanger, Margaret 49 Sarangi, Jaydeep 210 Sareen, Santosh 209–10 (ed.) Contemporary Australian Short Stories 209 Sargeant, Chloe 346 ‘Australian Same-Sex Couples Wanting to Get Married Tell Their Stories’ 346

440

Index Sargeson, Frank 362 Sarwal, Amit & Reema 3, 210 (ed.) Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader 3, 210 Sattler, Tony 398 The Saturday Evening Post (periodical) 56 The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art (periodical) 19 Savige, Jaya 245, 336, 338, 341 latecomers 338 Saving Mr Banks 404 Sayer, Karen 247 Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss in Britain 247 Sayers, Dorothy Lucie see Lucy Walker 371 Scales of Justice 397–8 The Scarlet Woman (periodical) 140, 236 Schafer, Elizabeth 240 (ed.) Australian Women’s Drama: Texts and Feminisms 240 Schaffer, Kay 27, 140, 235, 265, 351 Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition 140, 235, 265 Schepisi, Fred 405 Schindler’s List 155, 404 Schopenhauer, Arthur 318 Schreiner, Olive 14 The Story of an African Farm 14 The Science of Eugenics 50 Scott, Ann 66, 71 ‘The Banning of SEMP in Queensland’ 66, 71 Scott, Bonnie Kime 183, 187 ‘First Drafts for Transnational Women’s Writing: A Revisiting of the Modernisms of Woolf, West, Fauset and Dark’ 183 Scott, Gregory D. 248 ‘Enhanced Peripheral Visual Processing in Congenitally Deaf Humans is Supported by Multiple Brain Regions, including Primary Auditory Cortex’ 248 Scott, Joan Wallach 196 Scott, Kim 143, 148, 177, 184, 204, 206, 209, 211, 229, 301, 325, 330, 355, 390 Benang: From the Heart 204, 209, 229, 330 Taboo 301 That Deadman Dance 177, 390 True Country 355 Scott, Rosie 158, 254–5, 258 (ed.) Another Country 158 (ed.) A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers 254–5, 258 Scott, Walter (Sir) 14, 40 ‘The Chase’ 40 Screen Education (periodical) 397 Scriabin, Alexander 270 ‘Poem of Ecstasy’ 270 Sea Cruise 236 SeaChange 398 Seccombe, H.G. 166

Second World War see World War II The Secret Life of Us 398 Sedgwick, Eve 175 Selleck, Tom 404 Semper Floreat (periodical) 67, 70 The Sentimental Bloke 403 Sepinwall, Alan 399 The Revolution Was Televised 399 Serle, Geoffrey 9 Serle, Percival 166 An Australasian Anthology 166 Sester, Marius 402 Sewell, Stephen 87, 91 The Blind Giant is Dancing 91 Dreams in an Empty City 91 Sexton, Anne 379 Seymour, Alan 88, 92 Shaarawi, Huda 201 Shakespeare, William 12, 36, 63, 69, 96, 156, 164, 198, 233 As You Like It 36–7 Othello 96 Richard II 69–70 Shapcott, Thomas 65 Pursuant to the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 as Amended 65 Shapiro, Karl 181–2, 189 ‘Christmas Eve: Australia’ 182 ‘Hill at Parramatta’ 182 ‘Letter to Eleanor Dark, 1 Aug. 1944’ 182 ‘Letter to Eleanor Dark, 7 Jun. 1943’ 182 ‘Letter to Eric Dark, 15 Nov. 1943’ 182 ‘News to Australia’ 181–2 ‘Sydney Bridge’ 182 V-Letter and Other Poems 182 Sharma, Anurag 209 Mehraab/The Arch 209 Sharma, R.P. 209 (ed.) Dialogues with Australian Poets 209 Sharma, Sunil & Sangeeta 209 (ed.) Indo-Australian Anthology of Poetry 209 (ed.) Indo-Australian Anthology of Short Fiction 209 Sharman, Jim 77, 80 Blood and Tinsel 80 Sharrad, Paul 209 (ed.) Of Indian Origin: Writings from Australia 209 Shaw, Charles 404 Shaw, George 100 Sheller, Mimi 358–9 ‘Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings’ 359 ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm for a Live Sociology’ 358–9 Shelton, D.C. 70 Education – For What? 70 Shen, Fu 222 Six Records of a Floating Life 222 Shepparton Mechanics’ Institute 13

441

Index The Shepparton News (periodical) 13 Sheridan, Susan 134, 137–8, 140, 235–6, 239–40, 246, 283, 287, 367 Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, 1880s–1930s 134, 140 ‘Australian Feminist Literary History: Around 1981’ 239–40 Christina Stead 240 ‘Feminist Fables and Alexis Wright’s Art of the Fabulous in The Swan Book’ 283 Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark 138, 240 (ed.) Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds 240 Shieff, Sarah 3 (ed.) Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature 3 Shih, Shu-Mei 195 ‘Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition’ 195 The Shiralee 404 Shirley, Arthur 402 Showalter, Elaine 239 A Literature of Their Own 239 Shumway, David 156 Shusterman, Richard 156 ‘Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics’ 156 Silvey, Craig 407 Jasper Jones 407 Simic, Charles 342 Simic, Zora 138, 140, 142 ‘First Person Feminism: Fight Like A Girl by Clementine Ford’ 142 ‘“Women’s Writing” and “Feminism”: A History of Intimacy and Estrangement’ 138, 140, 142 Simoes da Silva, Tony 254–5, 257–9 ‘Displaced Selves in Contemporary Fiction, or the Art of Literary Activism’ 254–5, 259 Simon and Schuster 52 Simon, David 399 Simons, John 282–4, 287 Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation 282, 284 Simpson, Colin 217, 354 The Country Upstairs 217 Simpson, Helen 60 Acquittal 60 Simpson, Roger 398 Simsion, Graeme 118 The Rosie Project 118 Singh, Pankaj 210 Sinnett, Frederick 119, 282, 385 ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’ 119, 385 Sister Agnes see Agnes Row Sisteria podcast 142 Sisters Publishing 140, 236 Six Feet Under 399 Skeggs, Beverley 359

Class, Self, Culture 359 Skinner, Molly 208, 220 Tucker Sees India 208, 220 The Sky 406 Sladen, Douglas 216 The Japs at Home 216 Slater, Lisa 330 ‘The Land Holds All Things: Kim Scott’s Benang: A Guide to (Post)Colonial Spatiality’ 330 Slatter, Angela 380 The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings 380 ‘Finnegan’s Field’ 380 Sourdough and Other Stories 380 Sleight, Simon 18–19, 21–3 Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 18, 21–3 Slemon, Stephen 326, 330 Slessor, Kenneth 183–4, 308 Smaill, Belinda 397 ‘The Cowra Breakout’ 397 Smith, Ali Jane 275 ‘Becoming Fay Zwicky’ 275 Smith, Bernard 293 European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas 293 Smith, Charlotte 360 Smith, Ellen 185, 189 ‘Local Moderns: The Jindyworobak Movement and Australian Modernism’ 185 ‘Remapping Capricornia: Xavier Herbert’s Cosmopolitan Imagination’ 185 ‘White Aborigines: Xavier Herbert, P.R. Stephensen and the Publicist’ 189 Smith, Jeff 408 Film Art: An Introduction 408 Smith, Lindsay 89 Smith, Maggie 1 ‘Good Bones’ 1 Smith, Michelle J. 42 ‘Transforming Narratives of Colonial Danger: Imagining the Environments of New Zealand and Australia in Children’s Literature, 1862–1899’ 42 Smith, Sidonie 351 Smith, Sue 398 Smith, Terry 186 ‘Rethinking Modernism and Modernity Now’ 186 Smith, Vivian Brian 307 Smith’s Weekly (periodical) 184 Snow, C.P. 119 The Two Cultures: And a Second Look 119 Sobocinska, Agnieszka 215 (ed.) Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century 215 Social Education Materials Project (SEMP) 65, 71

442

Index Somerville, William 36 ‘Well led Kanguroo!’ 36 Sommer, Doris 174 Songs of the Army of the Night 223 Sons and Daughters 395, 396 Sorensen, Rosemary 140 Southerly (periodical) 119, 140, 308 Spark, Muriel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 67 Spears, Steve J. 87, 92–4, 96 Africa 93 The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin; When They Send Me Three and Fourpence 87–8, 94–6 Spence, Bruce 90 Spence, Catherine Helen 49, 236, 367 Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever 368 Handfasted 49 Spencer, Beth 118 The Body as Fiction/Fiction as a Way of Thinking 118 ‘A Response to Fiona Giles, “Milkbrain: Writing the Cognitive Body”’ 118 Spender, Dale 136–7, 140, 142–3, 152 Is it the Writing or the Sex? Or, Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good 152 (ed.) The Penguin Anthology of Australian Women’s Writing 140 ‘Reviewing: The Little Women Are Entitled To’ 136–7, 142 Spiegel, Alan 408 Fiction and the Cameron Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel 408 Spielberg, Steven 155, 404 Spinifex Press 236, 240 Spinoza, Baruch de 263, 267–8, 272 Squires, Claire 147–8 Srinivasa Iyengar, K.R. 209 St Pierre, Matthew 85 A Portrait of the Artist as Australian 85 Stable, J.J. 164 (ed.) The Bond of Poetry: A Book of Verse for Australasian Schools 164 Stallybrass, Peter 263 Stam, Robert 408 Stasny, Angélique 118 ‘Settler-Indigenous Relationships and the Emotional Regime of Empathy in Australian History School Textbooks in Times of Reconciliation’ 118 Stavanger, David 341 (ed.) Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word 340–1 Stead, Christina 47–52, 57, 102, 112–13, 134–5, 137, 140, 183, 189, 206, 236, 240, 306–7, 318, 324, 406 For Love Alone 137, 306, 406

The Man Who Loved Children 49–52, 137, 318 Seven Poor Men of Sydney 50–1, 135, 189, 306 Stedman, M.L. 404 The Light Between Oceans 404 Steed, Laurie 308 You Belong Here 308 Steele, Peter 11, 19, 275, 339 Steele, William 19, 275 Steen, Francis F. 120 ‘Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: An Introduction’ 120 Steger, Jason 151 Stella Count 142–4, 151–3 Stella Prize 4–5, 142, 144, 149–53, 241 Stendhal 228 The Red and the Black 228 Stephen, Ann 184, 186 ‘Introduction’ (Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917–1967) 184 ‘Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial Interpretation’ 186 Stephens, A.G. 9, 11, 13–16, 134–7, 165–6, 204, 235 ‘A Bookful of Sunlight’ 135–7 ‘One Realist and Another’ 135 ‘Untitled’ 135, 137 Stephens, John 118 ‘Affective Strategies, Emotion Schemas, and Empathic Endings: Selkie Girls and a Critical Odyssey’ 118 ‘Writing by Children, Writing for Children: Schema Theory, Narrative Discourse and Ideology’ 118 Stephensen, P.R. 189, 217, 297 The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self-Respect 189 Sternberg, Freda 56 Stevens, Bertram 55–6, 59 Stevens, Christopher David 118 Stevenson, Robert Louis 56 Stewart, Amanda 340 Stewart, Harold 186, 223 By the Walls of Old Kyoto: A Yearly Cycle of Landscape Poems with Prose Commentaries 223 The Exiled Immortal. A Song-Cycle 223 Phoenix Wings: Poems, 1940–46 223 Stewart, Ken 9, 11 ‘Journalism and the World of the Writer: The Production of Australian Literature, 1855–1915’ 9, 11 Stinson, Emmett 130, 149 ‘How Nice Is Too Nice? Australian Book Reviews and the “Compliment Sandwich”’ 130 Stone, Louis 18, 20–4, 306 Betty Wayside 21 Jonah 21–4, 306

443

Index STOP and CARE: The Society to Outlaw Pornography and Campaign Against Regressive Education 63–7, 69–71 STOP PRESS 63, 65–7, 69 Stopes, Marie 49 Storm Boy 405 Storm of Time (Dark, E.) 190 Stormy Petrel 398 Stow, Randolph 128, 299 Stratton, David 86 Streeton, Arthur 297 Strictly Ballroom 356 Strong, Archibald (Dr.) 56, 164 Stuckey, Hugh 398 Studies in Travel Writing (periodical) 357 Sullivan, Jane 151, 161 ‘The Gender Question Raises its Cultural Head, Again’ 151 ‘Turning Pages: Why Readers are Turning Away from Literary Fiction’ 161 The Sullivans 395–7 Summers, Anne 102, 140, 235 Damned Whores and God’s Police 102, 140, 235 The Sun (periodical) 216 Sunita De Souza Goes to Sydney 212 Surrealism 75, 186, 316 Sutherland, Bruce. 167 ‘On Australian Literature’ 167 Sutherland, Joan (Dame) 403 Swan Lake 391 Sybylla Press 140, 236 The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (periodical) 34, 36 The Sydney Mail (periodical) 10–11 The Sydney Morning Herald (periodical) 27, 151, 215, 219, 246, 396, 397 The Sydney Review of Books (periodical) 113, 128–31, 136, 143 Sykes, Bobbie 237 MumShirl 237 Synnott, Ashleigh 114 Szubanski, Magda 344–5, 349–51 The Reckoning 349 Taboo (Scott, K.) 301 Tacey, David 275, 321 Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth 275 Tait, Nevin 402 The Story of the Kelly Gang 402 Tait, Peta 78, 240, 402 (ed.) Australian Women’s Drama: Texts and Feminisms 240 Takolander, Maria 118, 340 ‘After Romanticism, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism: New Paradigms for Theorising Creativity’ 118 The End of the World 340

‘From the “Mad” Poet to the “Embodied” Poet: Reconceptualising Creativity through Cognitive Science Paradigms’ 118 Tan, Shaun 307–8 Tales from Outer Suburbia 307 Tang, Zhengqiu 206 (ed.) A Collection of Chinese Critical Essays on Australian Literature 206 Tantrum Press 236, 240 Tasker, John 75–80 ‘Notes on The Ham Funeral’ 80 Tasma see Jessie Couvreur Tasmania 36, 93, 104, 160, 165–7, 296, 325, 328–9, 331, 347, 407 The Tasmanian Mail (periodical) 35 Tatar, Maria 381 The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales 381 Taylor, A.B. 165–6 Taylor, Andrew 77, 79 Taylor, Anthea 347 Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster 347 Taylor, Brian 158 ‘Unseemly Language and the Law in New South Wales’ 158 Taylor, Elizabeth 404 Te Punga Somerville, Alice 186 ‘Searching for the Trans-Indigenous’ 186 Te Whiu, Anne-Marie 341 (ed.) Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word 340–1 The Telegraph (periodical) 159, 166 Tennant, Kylie 50, 139–40, 236 Teo, Hsu-Ming 369 Des Teufels Advokat 404 Teverson, Andrew 375 (ed.) The Fairy Tale World 375 TEXT (periodical) 118–19 Thacker, Andrew 185 ‘Introduction’ (Geographies of Modernism) 185 Thackeray, William 14 Theroux, Paul 355–6 Thiele, Colin 405 Thomas, Diana Mary Eva 118 Textiles in Text: Synaesthesia, Metaphor and Affect in Fiction 118 Thomas, Hugh 113 Thomas, Mark 139 Thompson, D. Lindsay 55 Thompson, Jay Daniel 241 ‘Introduction: Queer Writing – Setting the Scene’ 241 Thompson, John 394 Thompson, Karenlee 21 ‘The Australian Larrikin: C.J. Dennis’s [Un] sentimental Bloke’ 21 Thompson, Kirstin 408 Film Art: An Introduction 408 Thomson, Robert 58, 61

444

Index Thoreau, Henry David 296, 337 Walden 337 Thorn, Tim 224 ‘XIX’ 224 Thornton, Warwick 390 The Otherside Project 390 Thring, Frank 403 Thwaites, F.J. 220 The Redemption 220 Shadows over Rangoon 220 Tiffin, Chris 209 Tiffin, Helen 209, 282, 329 ‘Animal Writes: Ethics, Experiments and Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish’ 282 The Times (periodical) 135, 137, 216 The Times on Sunday (periodical) 397 Timewell, Eric 87 (ed.) AIDS in Australia: Context and Practice 87 To Sir, with Love 66–7 Tofighian, Omid 231–2 Tolstoy, Leo 14 War and Peace 14, 137 Torres Strait Islander people 27, 65, 99, 184, 186, 278 Tortured for Christ 67 Tout, Dan 189 ‘Reframing “Inky” Stephensen’s Place in Australian Cultural History’ 189 The Town and Country Journal (periodical) 137 Traitors 87, 91 Tranter, John 211, 338, 341 ‘The Anaglyph’ 341 Travers, P.L. 404–5 Mary Poppins 404 Treasure, Rachael 372 Jillaroo 372 Tredinnick, Mark 337 Treloar, Carol 140 ‘The Voice of Feminism’ 140 The Triad (periodical) 204 Triffitt, Nigel 92 Trikha, Pradeep 210 Trivedi, Harish 209 Trollope, Anthony 56, 398 Troscianko, Emily T. 120 Trump, Donald 1 Tsiolkas, Christos 1–2, 4, 6, 81, 118, 240, 304–5, 307–8, 310, 321–2, 324, 357 Barracuda 81, 308, 322 Dead Europe 357 The Jesus Man 321 Loaded 81, 307, 321 The Slap 81, 305, 307, 322 Tsur, Reuven 116 What is Cognitive Poetics? 116 Tula, Papunya 299–300 Tulloch, John 395, 397

(ed.) Australian Television: Programs, Pleasures and Politics 397 A Country Practice: ‘Quality Soap.’ 395 Tulloch, Richard 92 Turcotte, Gerry 326, 387 Turnbull, Paul 52 ‘Australia’s Heart of Darkness’ 52 Turnbull, Sue 397 (ed.) Tomorrow Never Knows: Soap on Australian Television 397 Turner, Ethel 18–23, 306, 354 The Little Larrikin 18–23 Seven Little Australians 18, 354 Turner, Graeme 264–5, 268, 269, 320, 394, 397 (ed.) Australian Television: Programs, Pleasures and Politics 397 (ed.) The Australian TV Book 397 Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture 320 National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative 269 Turner Hospital, Janette 208, 211, 221, 307 Turner, Lillian 368 ‘A Wayside Romance’ 368 Turner, Margaret 324, 329 Turner, Mark 116 Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science 116 TV Times (periodical) 396 TV Week (periodical) 396 Two Friends 398 Uhlmann, Anthony 117 ‘Where Literary Studies Is, and What It Does’ 117 Unaipon, David 55, 275, 279, 299 Underbelly 397–8 Underhill, Nancy 55 Making Australian Art, 1916–49: Sydney Ure Smith, Patron and Publisher 55 United Nations General Assembly International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 257 Up from Below: Poems of the 1980s 240 Ure Smith, Sydney 55, 188 Urquhart, Jessie 55, 57 Urry, John 359 ‘Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings’ 359 D’Urso, Sandra 75–9, 183 Australian Theatre, Modernism, and Patrick White: Governing Culture. 75–9 ‘Patrick White and Aesthetic Modernism in Mid-Century Australia’ 183 Ustinov, Peter 404 Vader, John 222 The Battle of Sydney 222 Vagabond Press 339

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Index Valentine, Victor 404 ‘Darcy [sic] Hits the Jackpot’ 404 Van Den Driesen, Cynthia 210 (ed.) Patrick White Centenary: The Legacy of a Prodigal Son 210 Van Diemen’s Land 35, 104, 328 Van Dyke, Dick 404 van Neerven, Ellen 108 Heat and Light 108 Vanity Fair (periodical) 55 Varatharajan, Prithvi 338, 342 Entries 338 Varney, Denise 75–9, 183 Australian Theatre, Modernism, and Patrick White: Governing Culture. 75–9 ‘Patrick White and Aesthetic Modernism in Mid-Century Australia’ 183 Vashti’s Voice (periodical) 236 Veith, Errol 402–3, 405–6 Historical Dictionary of Australian and New Zealand Cinema 402–3, 405–6 Veracini, Lorenzo 186, 188 ‘Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies’ 186 Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview 188 Vickers, Nancy J 157 Vickery, Ann 241, 341 Victoria 13–14, 29, 40, 89, 95, 117, 300, 356, 402 Vietnam 108, 218, 220–1, 223–4 Vietnam War 87, 357 Viidikas, Vicky 224 Wrappings 224 Vijayashree, C. 209 Vint, Sherryl 286 Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal 286 Virago Press 239 Vivanco, Laura 365 Vivienne, Son 345–6, 351 (ed.) Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ 344–6, 351 ‘Introduction: Everyday Activism – Writing, Drawing, and Dreaming from Between the Cracks’ 345 Vogue (periodical) 55 Vonnegut, Kurt 72 Breakfast of Champions 72 ‘The Noodle Factory’ 73 Slaughterhouse-Five 72 Vu, Chi 224 Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale 224 Wagan Watson, Samuel 275, 338, 342 Wakeling, Corey 341 Waldock, A.J.A. 165–6 Walker, Brenda 240 Poetry and Gender 240 Walker, David 11, 215, 217, 356–7 Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 215

(ed.) Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century 215 (ed.) The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing 357 ‘The “Paternoster Row Machine” and the Australian Book Trade, 1890–1945’ 11 Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region 217 Walker, Kath 139, 237; see also Oodgeroo Noonuccal Walker, Lucy 371–2 The Loving Heart 371–2 Walker, Shirley 237, 248 (ed.) Who Is She? Images of Woman in Australian Fiction 237 Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 183–5 Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation 184 ‘The New Modernist Studies’ 183 Wall, Dorothy 403 The Wall Street Journal (periodical) 197–8 Wallace, Edgar 59n Wallace, John 222n Invasion 54, 222 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris 54, 209, 307, 341 (ed.) Collected Poems 275–6 Melbourne or the Bush 54 Walsh, Stanley 90n Walton, James 159 Wander, Waif; see also Mary Fortune ‘Twenty-Six Years Ago’ 29 Wang, Guanglin 207 ‘A Hard-Won Success: Australian Literary Studies in China’ 204–5, 207 Translation in Diasporic Literatures 207 Wang, Labao 204–6 ‘Australian Literature in China’ 206 (ed.) A History of Australian Literary Criticism 204 Wanhalla, Angela 52 Ward, Glenys 237 Wandering Girl 237 Ward, Russel 18, 26, 99, 235 The Australian Legend 26, 99 Warden, Ian 397 Warne, Shane 18 Warner, Denis 219 Wake Me If There’s Trouble 219 Warner, Michael 149–50 Warung, Price 10, 386 Waten, Judah 205 Waterhouse, Richard 25–7, 30 The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia 25–6 Watling, Thomas 295 Watson, Janet 222 The Hindustan Contessa 222 Watson, John 337 Watson, Reg 395

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Index Watson, Sam 104 The Kadaitcha Sung 104–5 Watson, Sophie 262, 270 (ed.) Postmodern Cities and Spaces 262 Watts, Madeleine 112 ‘Rev. Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man’ 112 Watts, Rob 48 ‘Beyond Nature and Nurture: Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Australian History’ 48 Way, Margaret 366 We Are Going 139 Wearne, Alan 307, 340 The Lovemakers 307 Weaver, Jackie 86 Weaver, Rachael 282, 296, 369–70 (ed.) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction 369 (ed.) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction 369 Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy 282, 296 Weaver, Sigourney 406 Webb, Frances 280 Webb, Jen 342 Webby, Elizabeth 2, 10–11, 138, 140, 238, 299 (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature 2 Colonial Voices 238 ‘Colonial Writers and Readers’ 10, 138 (ed.) Goodbye to Romance 238 ‘Not Reading the Nation: Australian Readers of the 1890s’ 11 ‘Patrick Victor (Paddy) White’ 299 The Weekly Critical Review (periodical) 136 Weinman, Sarah 72 Weir, Peter 405–6 Wells, H.G. 57, 60 Wentworth, William Charles 294–6, 299 ‘Australasia’ 294, 296, 299 Wernick, Andrew 160–1 West, Morris 221, 404 The Ambassador 221 The Devil’s Advocate 404 The Shoes of the Fisherman 404 West, Simon 340, 342 The West Wing 399 Westbury, Atha 377, 379 Australian Fairy Tales 377 ‘Gumtree Hollow’ 377 ‘I Don’t Know’ 377–8 ‘Twilight’ 377 Westerly (periodical) 119, 138 Western Australia 117, 164, 301, 325, 331, 337, 370 The Westralian Worker (periodical) 167 Wevers, Lydia 238 (ed.) Goodbye to Romance 238 Whitcomb, Eleanor 93 White, Allon 263

White, Hayden 102 Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe 102 White, Patrick 5, 50, 75–81, 93, 105, 118, 159, 183, 204–8, 210, 227–8, 275, 280, 299, 304–7, 310, 317–18, 320–1, 324, 366, 407 The Burnt Ones 307 The Eye of the Storm 206, 407 A Fringe of Leaves 299 ‘The Ham Funeral’ 75–81 ‘The Night the Prowler’ 307 Patrick White Speaks 320 Patrick White: Collected Plays 79 Riders in the Chariot 305–7, 318 The Season at Sarsaparilla 307 The Signal Driver 80 The Solid Mandala 305, 307 The Tree of Man 206, 299, 307, 318 The Twyborn Affair 105 Voss 206, 211, 227–8, 299, 407 White, Petra 339 White, Richard 102, 354, 356–7 ‘Australia’ 188, 275, 354 Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 102, 354, 377 (ed.) The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing 357 ‘The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War’ 357 Whitlam, Gough 85, 90, 99, 163, 396 Whitlock, Gillian 139–40, 209, 237, 350 Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers 140, 237 Whitman, Stuart 404 Whitman, Walt 254, 284–5, 287 Leaves of Grass 284 Whittaker, Alison 110, 302, 340 Blakwork 302, 340 ‘A Love Like Dorothea’s’ 302 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf 67 Wicked Women 240 Wighton, Rosemary 140, 144 Wilcox, Dora 58 Wilde, William H. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 367 Wilding, Michael 208–209 Wilkes, G.A. 166 Wilkinson, Jessica 340 marionette: a biography of miss marion davies 340 ‘The Realpoetik Manifesto’ 340 Suite for Percy Grainger 340 Williams, John F. 47 The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913–1939 47 Williams, Maslyn 217 Faces of My Neighbour: Three Journeys into East Asia 217

447

Index Five Journeys from Jakarta: Inside Sukarno’s Indonesia 217 Williams, Raymond 293 Williamson, David 91, 93, 211, 398, 406 The Club 91 The Department 91 Don’s Party 91 The Removalists 91 Williamson, Geordie 128, 131 The Burning Library: Our Great Novelists Lost and Found 128 Willmot, Eric 104 Pemulwuy: The Rainbow Warrior 104 Wilson, Josephine 168 Extinctions 168 Wilson, Keith 218 You’ll Never Get Off the Island 218 Wilson, R.B.J. 66, 68 ‘Are You Concerned About Your Children’s Moral Welfare?’ 66 ‘Views on Sex in School Books’ 68 Windsor, Gerard 141–2 Wine and Roses 223 ‘Winifred Shaw, Australia’s Youngest Poet’ ( Jusef, A.) 56 Winkiel, Laura A. 183 ‘Introduction’ (Geomodernisms) 183 Winter, Bronwyn 200, 271 Hijab and the Republic: Uncovering the French Headscarf Debate 200 Winterson, Jeanette 379 Winton, Tim 5, 142, 161, 228–31, 240, 275, 277, 280, 304, 306–7, 322, 406 ‘Aquifer’ 306 The Boy Behind the Curtain 231 Cloudstreet 161, 228–30, 306–7 Eyrie 277 In the Winter Dark 228, 406 The Shepherd’s Hut 277, 280 That Eye, the Sky 277, 406 The Turning 277, 306, 406 The Wire 399 Wischenbart, Rüdiger 131 Business of Books 2018: New Tunes for an Old Trade 131 Wisker, Gina 384 ‘Gothic Postcolonialisms’ 384 Witcombe, Eleanor 398 Wodehouse, P.G. 59, 61 Wolf, Michael 157 Wolfe, Patrick 186 Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event 186 Wollstonecraft, Mary 318, 360 Woman at Home (periodical) 246 Womanspeak (periodical) 140 Women in Literary Arts Australia organisation 142

Women of Letters literary salon 142 Women of the Sun 397–8 Wong, Shee Ping 221 The Poison of Polygamy 221 Wonguri-Mandjigai 298–9 Wood, Charlotte 108, 112–14, 283–90 Animal People 283 The Natural Way of Things 108, 112–13, 283–8, 290 Wood, Danielle 379–80 Mothers Grimm 380 ‘Renegotiating “Once Upon A Time”: Fairy Tales in Contemporary Australian Writing’ 379 Woodward, James 245 ‘deaf/Deaf: Origins and Usage’ 245 Woolf, Virginia 49, 108, 137, 187, 317, 407–8 Mrs Dalloway 49, 67, 108, 187 Woolfe, Sue 118–19 The Mystery of The Cleaning Lady: A Writer Looks at Creativity and Neuroscience 118–19 The Secret Cure 118 Wordsworth, William 284 working-class 18–23, 113–14, 159, 304, 378 World War I 26, 47, 75, 102–3, 105, 164–5, 216, 218, 220, 345, 357, 362 World War II 52, 81, 105, 164, 183, 215, 218, 221, 244, 255, 298, 307, 317, 338, 365, 403–4 Wren, P.C. 59, 61 Beau Geste 59 Wright, Alexis 5, 27, 108, 148, 184, 204, 206, 237, 301, 324, 330, 380–1, 385, 390–1 Carpentaria 204, 207, 301, 330, 391 Grog War: One Town’s Fight Against Alcohol 391 Plains of Promise 391 The Swan Book 108, 380–1, 385, 390–1 Tracker 27 Wright, Arthur 402–3 Gambler’s Gold 402 In the Last Stride 402 Keane of Kalgoorlie 402 Wright, Ed 127 Wright, Fiona 304, 338 Domestic Interior 338 Wright, Judith 25, 138, 167, 211, 243–52, 269, 292, 298–9, 321, 324, 336 ‘Aboriginals in Australian Poetry’ 245 Birds: Poems 248 Born of the Conquerors: Selected Essays 249 Collected Poems, 1942–1985 247–8, 250–2 ‘Conch-Shell’ 250 ‘Dust’ 249, 298 The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney 247 Five Senses: Selected Poems 247, 249 ‘Habitat’ 247 Half a Lifetime 243, 244, 245 ‘Interplay’ 249

448

Index ‘Lament for Passenger Pigeons’ 251 ‘Learning to Look’ 249 The Moving Image 298 ‘Parrots’ 248–9, 250 Portrait of a Friendship: The Letters of Judith Wright and Barbara Blackman, 1950–2000 247, 252 Preoccupations in Australian Poetry 292, 336 ‘Rainforest’ 250 ‘Silence’ 252 ‘South of My Days’ 298 With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright 247 Wuhan 2 Wylie, Ida Alexa Ross 366 The Red Mirage 365 Wyndham, Diana 48 Wyndham, Susan 151, 287 ‘The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood: A Novel Born from Anger: Dark Material Emerges When a Writer Decides to Go With Her Instincts’ 287 xenophobia 2, 102, 311; see also racism Xiang, Lan 204 The Study on the Tradition and Evolution of Australian Eco-Literature 204 Xu, Daozhi 204, 207 Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature 204 ‘Liminality and Communitas in Literary Representations of Aboriginal and Asian Encounters’ 207 Yahp, Beth 237 Yandell, Christian 377 Yang, Goubin 204 ‘Australian Poetry in Chinese Consciousness: A Translator’s Note’ 204 Yang, Yongchun 204, 207 Critique of Colonialism: Historical and Cultural Imprints on Australian Fiction 207 A Study of Identity in Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Literature 204 Ye, Shengnian 204, 207

Critique of Colonialism: Historical and Cultural Imprints on Australian Fiction 207 Cultural Diversity and Colonialism: Some Aspects of Migrant Fiction in Australia 204 Yeldham, Peter 398 You Can’t See ’Round Corners 398 The Young Doctors 395 Young, William 93 Zavaglia, Liliana 293 White Apology and Apologia: Australian Novels of Reconciliation 293 Zeller, Robert 338 Zhan, Chunjuan 207 ‘A Study of Literary Criticisms on Australian Reconciliation Novels: Carpentaria and The Secret River’ 216 Zhao, Jingshen 204 Zhou, Xiaojin 204, 206–7 ‘A Critical Survey of Chinese Journal Articles on Australian Literature in China 1979–2016’ 206–7 Zhu, Jiongqiang 204 (ed.) An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Fiction 204 Zhu, Xiaoying Helen Garner: A Critical Study 204 Zinoman, Jason 347 ‘Introducing a Major New Voice in Comedy (Who Also Attacks Comedy)’ 347 Žižek, Slavoj 254 Living in the End Times. 254 Zong, Emily Yu 207 ‘“I Protest, Therefore I Am”: CosmoMulticulturalism, Suburban Dreams, and Difference as Abjection in Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon’ 207 Zusak, Markus 404 The Book Thief 404 Zuyi, Ma 205 ПO 338 Fitzroy: A Biography 338

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