Australia: A Construct of the Mind

2015

for their kind and understanding advice and to Australian writers in general for being patient with critical scrutiny. I hope this is the book Vivian Smith envisioned when he and I discussed the outlines of this project at Circular Quay in January 2010. Essays of mine adjacent to this book though not part of it shed light on some figures undertreated here. David Malouf is given a full overview in my essay for the 2014 special issue of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) on his work, while there is more on Tim Winton in my essay in Tim Winton: Critical Essays, edited by Lyn McCredden and Nathanael O'Reilly (University of Western Australia Press, 2014). Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap and Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars, as well as their precedents in D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, are examined in my 2009 JASAL article "Something to Keep You Steady". Patrick White's relationship to late modernity is examined in "The Solid Mandala and Patrick White's Late Modernity" in Transnational Literature, November 2011. Other work of mine on Gerald Murnane's recent fiction is to be found in my reviews of A History of Books in Antipodes and Southerly, both published in 2013. More on Stead's For Love Alone is to be found in my article in the first issue of the Chinese Journal of Australian Cultural Studies, edited by Wang Guanglin of Songjiang University in Shanghai. Shirley Hazzard's United Nations short stories, mentioned with respect to Frank Moorhouse in Chapter 7, are examined in my essay in Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays, Contemporary Australian Literature x xi communication are among them, as well as, necessarily, the greater viability of democratic institutions in the post-Cold War world. Stephen Greenblatt wisely urges us to avoid a "sentimental pessimism" that "collapses everything into a global vision of domination and subjection". 1 But, like all periods of history, the current one involves forms of injustice and dogma that writers must defy, evade or circumvent. The assumption behind this book is that writers always have to struggle against their cultural context, or, in Greenblatt's words, to "make imaginative adaptations" in their work, no matter their manifest cultural position or the apparent benignity of the ruling forces. 2 This era's writers have a unique challenge, and this book tells the story of how, in Australia, they have responded to this challenge. I am not saying that these are the only contemporary Australian writers who can provide this testimony, nor that those Australian writers who cannot be read in this way are either not worth reading or not of aesthetic value. This book offers one map of what is going on today; other critics would draw other maps. Furthermore, Australian literature is different from that of the UK and USA in that it has never had a set canon. As important as figures such as Henry Lawson, Judith Wright, Patrick White and Peter Carey have been, the reader who does not wish to engage with these writers has always been able to navigate around them. In turn, no one person can read all of Australian literature or be conversant with its full range: it is too large and too diverse for that. Australian poetry has had more of a set canon than Australian fiction-certainly in the mid-twentieth century no anthology of Australian poetry could exclude Kenneth Slessor, David Campbell or R. D. Fitzgeraldbut today of those three only Slessor still plays a central role in the national literary conversation. The fortunes of Adam Lindsay Gordon-the Australian poet in the nineteenth century, but ranked below his contemporaries Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall by the late twentieth century-testify to the openness of the Australian canon, an openness that has only increased as Indigenous, migrant and expatriate writers, as well as those working in languages other than English, have more recently stretched the very definition of what it is to be Australian. Meanwhile, the contemporary availability of digital and print-on-demand technologies has expanded the mathematical possibility of what can be canonical and, along with a more tolerant cultural agenda, has meant we have more books to choose from than ever before. Australian literature, because of its traditional pluralisms, is well equipped to handle this new contingency. I attribute part of this to the fact that Australia has had no single dominant metropolitan area. Whereas London and New York have defined British and American literature far more than any other city in those countries, Sydney and Melbourne have kept up with each other, while Perth and Brisbane have held their own in a smaller compass. Canberra plays a key role in this book, not just as site of much of its composition (while I was a visiting fellow at the Canberra campus of the University of New South Wales), but as a potential ground of re-emergent Australian idealism-reflecting the fact that there is no single metropolitan space for the artificially built national capital to rival. The plurality of Australian literature is its great joy, and one of the qualities that enable it to be resilient against the threats to the imagination with which this book is so concerned.

Benang, by Kim Scott (1999), and Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan (2001), are historical novels which uphold Linda Hutcheon’s description of the postmodern novel: “both fiction and historiography are simultaneously used and abused, installed and subverted, asserted and denied.” Yet both novels also reveal at their core a deeply ethical imperative. Ultimately responding to their moment of creation, both novels in very different ways argue the impossibility of a state‐sanctioned version of the Australian past. They are political works of literature which, in my reading, intervened culturally into one of the most central existential debates in Australian society. The History Wars were a series of disputes centred around epistemological, methodological, philosophical and political questions of evidence, honesty, truth and myth in relation to Australia’s past. They were fuelled by a series of measures in the 1980s and 1990s, not least the Native Title Act (1993) which overturned the legal falsehood of terra nullius, and aimed to acknowledge aspects of the country’s past which contributed to the oppression of Aboriginal people. The spirit of Reconciliation, enshrined in government policy in 1990, led to brief moments of official recognition such as the famous ‘Redfern Speech’ by Paul Keating in December 1992. Identifying the landmark Mabo court ruling as “an historic turning point,” Keating stated that “there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth.” Against this framework, a terminology of ‘myth’, ‘untruth’, ‘lies’, ‘invention’ and, most heatedly, ‘fabrication’, dominated Australian politics during the 1990s and early 2000s, and continues to be prominent today. The History Wars gave rise to an atmosphere of extreme existential crisis in the universities. Not only for historians, but for all people involved in creating and relating Australian historical narratives, this involved a questioning of methodology which spanned the role of paper sources versus oral sources, the idea of historical records either being manufactured for a particular aim, or indeed misinterpreted and manipulated for particular political reasons became central. The opening up of historical practice in the 1970s and 1980s had been necessitated by the conditions of colonisation, namely the absence of historical evidence of oppression, and the pretence that the only valid source is a written one. However this opening up and the subsequent experimentation with a variety of creative approaches to history were denigrated as untruthful. One of these creative approaches was through historical fiction that was critically and politically engaged with the very process of how history is ‘written’. While not setting out to philosophically examine and appraise the notion of ‘historical truth’, this thesis seeks to analyse the way in which the notions of historical truth and evidence were taken up by two Australian writers in novels published during Howard’s second term (1998‐2001), following a tumultuous decade of political and epistemological debate over history and historiography. It analyses these authors’ examinations of the process by we reach collective understandings (or not) about the past, and in the role played by literature in that process.

Comparative Literature: East & West, 2017

World literature has a double edge. On the one hand, it is a matter of turning the eyes of a local literature and culture toward the world at large; on the other hand, it catches the literatures of other cultures and continents with the local radar. In this article, I will turn the radar toward Australia in an attempt to see the literatures of that continent in a world literature perspective. Australia is both an old colony and a modern nation state which, at the same time, embraces a whole continent, scarcely populated on most of its territory, densely populated in its urban areas, with indigenous first nation peoples with the longest unbroken history on Earth and with an increasing influx of migrants. The complexity of modernity and prehistorical reality, of postcolonial conditions and realities of migration makes Australia a complex continent. This complexity has been understood under various headings in the about one hundred years since 1901 of independent Australia, and these differences have influenced questions of individual and collective identity and belonging, questions which have been crucial for Australian literature. Among the writers will be Patrick White (Australian native), Mudrooroo (Aboriginal origin), Richard Flanagan (Australian nativefrom Tasmania) and Christof Tsiolkas (Greek origin).

2007

Throughout the 1980s, Australia was preparing for its biggest national celebration yet: that of the Bicentenary of the arrival of the first European settlers. The Australian Bicentenary can be seen as a media event, which is defined as a construct, rather than a representation of the social order (Couldry 56) and, as such, this generated an interesting conflict between the many different, sometimes contrasting, versions of Australian history to be presented as official. The controversy was mainly centred on the representation of Aborigines, ethnic minorities and, to a certain degree, the involvement of women throughout history which, in turn, exposed the fragility of historical narratives as truth and fact. Academic historians were well aware of the necessity to reorient the historiographic process since the so-called poststructural turn, but as these debates were strongly connected to the Bicentenary, this was arguably the first time that the Australian public was made aware of them. An interesting consequence of the shift of these debates from academia to society was the massive increase in the writing and publication of historical fiction. Novelists became key figures in the process of reassessing and reconstructing Australian history, demonstrating, thus, the fluidity of the boundaries between history and fiction. This thesis examines the many ways in which historical fiction was used to question and undermine the “legend” form of Australian national identity (as defined, primarily, by Russel Ward) as creator and holder of history, how this dynamic connects with the political project of the Labor government of the 1980s in its attempt to promote historic heteroglossia and social polyphony in the continent, and how the Bicentenary acted as an important catalyst for these debates. Chapter One provides a context of the political and institutional making of the Bicentenary from the creation of the Australian Bicentennial Authority in 1979, also looking at the historical and broader literary projects associated with it. Chapter Two examines in more detail the changes in the discipline of history (from constructionist to reconstructionist to deconstructionist modes of historiography) and the postmodern influence of metafictional historiography. The following chapters are analytical and examine the many ways in which the classical notion of Australian identity was questioned by novelists. Chapter Three focuses on the rise and influence of second-wave feminism in history and historical fiction. Chapter Four deals with the displacement of manliness from the defining centre of identity. Chapter Five looks at the notion of Aboriginality and how it was being defined and redefined in the 1980s. Chapter Six examines the rise of ethnic literatures in the early stages of Australian multiculturalism. The conclusion briefly looks at how these debates about the boundaries between history and fiction have changed in the 1990s and 2000s, paying particular attention to the contemporary resurgence of these debates seen since the publication of The Secret River in 2005.

Creating White Australia (Carey and McLisky eds), 2009

The old adage, ‘silence speaks louder than words’ does not mean that silence is simply a passive absence. As renowned playwright Harold Pinter demonstrated, silence has a power to communicate and dominate. This article explores the endurance of the Great Australian Silence over the history of our colonial past, and the continuing colonization of Indigenous people. Despite the introduction of Indigenous Studies and Indigenous History into school and university programs, and despite the heart-felt statements that Australians need to understand their own history, that understanding remains partial. The desire to engage with this history appears problematic. This article argues that the failure of a more embracing history to penetrate, more than partially, into the education system and popular understanding is a product of a particular national imagination embodied in projections of the Australian landscape and the Australian individual. The case is put that a particular way of framing the embodiment of national identity and the land has created an imagining of ‘Australianness’ that impacts on our capacity to hear and accept the history of Indigenous colonization. It argues this embodiment, when accepted uncritically, perpetuates not simply a silence but an un-history, a not-telling, a non-acceptance of colonial history post-1788.

2007

2008

Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA), Vol.5 No.1, 2014. ISSN 2013- 6897. http://www.easa-australianstudies.net/ejournal/show/2/_/7, 2014

David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993) chooses an imagery that evokes a Indigenous-inspired way of dealing with historical experience so as to “heal” the nation. Thus, his fictional attempt at the Reconciliation of mainstream and Indigenous Australia partakes in the official revision of contact history which recognises Indigenous claims upon a de-Aboriginalised past from which an Anglo-Celtic national identity has been constructed. Yet, Malouf’s revision of Australianness is as troubling as the official Reconciliation process proved to be. Malouf’s romantic adaptation of the life of the historic James Murrells—emulating the iconic figure of the white man gone native—replicates the tense 1990s debate on Reconciliation and Apology but takes it out of its political context. Unlike his real-life model, the cultural hybrid Gemmy Fairley is consistently infantilised and feminised at his return to white civilisation, which undercuts his possibilities for agency and takes the reader back to the very tensions in race and gender the narrative underplays but cannot overcome. Whereas Malouf’s subscription to a romantic literary project aims to bring the nation into contact with itself through a healing re-Dreaming of history, this produces a f(r)iction in which re-imagination and distortion of the past uncannily circle through each other, unsettling the political correctness the tale aims to forward. This postcolonial uncanny ambiguity, the result of competing histories and world views, is in tune with the open-endedness of Malouf’s novel: as a postmodern Australian explorer narrative, rather than offering a notion of resolution, its longing for a repaired or “full” Australian identity remains trapped in nostalgia.

David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993) chooses an imagery that evokes a Native-inspired way of dealing with historical experience so as to 'heal' the nation. Thus, his fictional attempt at the Reconciliation of mainstream and Indigenous Australia partakes in the official revision of contact history which recognises Indigenous claims upon a de-Aboriginalised past from which an Anglo-Celtic national identity has been constructed. Yet, Malouf's revision of Australianness is as troubling as the official Reconciliation process has proven to be. Malouf's romantic adaptation of the life of the historic James Murrells— emulating the iconic figure of the white man gone native—replicates the tense 1990s debate on Reconciliation and Apology but takes it out of its political context. Unlike his real-life model, the cultural hybrid Gemmy Fairley is consistently infantilised and feminised at his return to white civilisation, which undercuts his possibilities for agency and takes the reader back to the very tensions in race and gender the narrative underplays but cannot overcome. Whereas Malouf's subscription to a romantic literary project aims to bring the nation into contact with itself through a healing re-Dreaming of history, this produces a f(r)iction in which re-imagination and distortion of the past uncannily circle through each other, unsettling the political correctness the tale aims to forward. This postcolonial uncanny ambiguity, the result of competing histories and world views, is in tune with the open-endedness in Malouf's novel: as a postmodern Australian explorer narrative, rather than offering a notion of resolution, its longing for a repaired or " full " Australian identity remains trapped in nostalgia. (258 words)