Issue Details: First known date: 2015... 2015 Colonialism, Racial Violence and Loss : The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and The Roving Party
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) and Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2011) resonate with the violence of the colonising process. The books relate, respectively, to murders that took place in New South Wales in 1901 just prior to Federation, and in Tasmania during the 1820s. Both novels employ elements of the Gothic mode to represent social disorder, and equate systematic racism with the mechanics of moral corruption in a hostile colonial environment. In their efforts to make sense of the past each, in its own way, has something to say about how opportunism and upward social mobility are linked to the possession of whiteness. Each taps into an historical frame of reference in which whiteness is understood, not simply as skin colour, but as something essential to the founding vision of Australia as a nation.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Literary Studies vol. 30 no. 1 30 May Paul Sharrad (editor), 2015 10502546 2015 periodical issue

    'Selected and revised essays from a seminar held in September 2014 at the University of Wollongong celebrating fifty years of Thomas Keneally as a novelist.'

    Source: Publisher's blurb.

    2015
Last amended 15 Dec 2016 10:10:35
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