'This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors’ insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing tracks Australian women authors’ varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'This chapter considers silencing in relation to women’s writing on the First World War. Women claimed spaces to voice war’s impact both during the conflict and long after cessation of hostilities in November 1918, while negotiating expectations for emotion to be contained, grief to be observed in quietude and male heroism to be revered and privileged. Focussing on practices and motifs of silencing, we cut across prevailing notions that women’s war writing is merely trite and in thrall to duty, heroism and sacrifice for nation and empire to identify sites of conflict, compliance and disruption and speculate on the creation of empathetic communities through writing.'
Source: Abstract.
'Set in Sydney in 1913 but not published until 1933, Among the Reeds is the sole novel written by Alice Muskett, a woman better known as a painter in the period of women’s emancipation in Australia. It was published under the pen-name “Jane Laker”, and takes the form of Jane’s journal, over the period of a year. This chapter reads the novel as a perceptive and optimistic account of the key moment of feminist and modernist transition – until the shadow of the Great War falls across that sunlit Sydney world. This historically significant novel has long been out of print and the chapter explores the way it dramatises women’s conflicts over marriage and career.'
Source: Abstract.
'Ranging from feminist movements, Labour Movement to celebration of Australian natural world, Mary Gilmore has been a legend. Gilmore’s complex yet “eternal” love for the legendary Australian national poet, Henry Lawson, and their extraordinary intellectual literary partnership has remained in oblivion. Gilmore’s biographers have often doubted that Lawson’s literary fame is the result of Gilmore’s silent sacrifice of her literary space because of her blind love for Lawson. Based on Gilmore’s extensive collection of verse, prose, biographies and unpublished letters, this chapter explores the feminist space of relationship between two talented and self-reliant Australian women writers, Dame Mary Gilmore and Henry Lawson’s mother, Louisa Lawson and their literary life in relation to Henry Lawson.'
Source: Abstract.
'In 1904, Beatrice Grimshaw travelled to the Pacific islands, documenting her tour of Fiji in a book-length travel narrative, From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands (1907) (subsequently re-published as Fiji and its Possibilities [1907]). Her book makes scant reference to indentured Indian labour and focuses instead on the amiable Fijian as reformed cannibal. The point of this essay is that the Australian literary tradition must be read with clear-sighted and unflinching appraisal of its unsavoury elements (and Grimshaw’s blatant racism provides an example of such) as much as it lauds its achievements. To do so offers a way forward for Australian literature as it navigates a tradition of denial and silence on key aspects of its colonial past.'
Source: Abstract.
'It is perhaps ironic that the first Australian Literary Award would be initiated and funded by an Australian woman writer of remarkable élan, and the first recipient of the award would be the dominant and redoubtable Australian male author Patrick White. Miles Franklin (1879–1954) maybe regarded as Australia’s first feminist woman writer, a pioneering figure, who not only broke the silence but also pushed against the boundaries and borders not without controversy in many cases. Spanning more than a century of activist writing Miles Franklin, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Jean Devanny, Eleanor Dark and Germaine Greer can be assessed as intrepid voices of Australian women’s writing. Remarkable too is their commitment to and disenchantment with Marxist ideology as supporters and members of the Australian Communist Party.'
Source: Abstract.
'Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s foremost women writers whose fictional works have, since the early 1980s, tracked and charted aspects of Australian life. Her novels and short stories refigure literary and national spaces, particularly for women, but also in terms of cross-cultural interactions across the settler-Indigenous divide. Her most well-known and celebrated novels, Lilian’s Story (1985) and the international best-seller, The Secret River (2005) have rightly become classics in the field of Australian literature. This chapter analyses the ways in which Grenville’s narratives have explored the “dark places” of Australian life and have illuminated and teased out the tensions, inequalities and violence lurking below the surface of the “lucky country” and how they problematise the all-too-easily accepted story of white settlement.'
Source: Abstract.
'This chapter is an examination of contested visions of a shared place. In the garrison city of Brisbane, Queensland, during the years of World War II, three notable female Australian writers, Gwen Harwood, Faith Richmond and Judith Wright, lived or worked in close proximity, although apparently entirely unknown to each other. This chapter explores the life trajectories of each within this timeframe, as well as the ways in which their writings depicted both their varied experiences and their differing impressions of the specific spaces they inhabited within a shared urban place, Australia’s third metropolis. The vectors of space, place and time are all intimately in play here.'
Source: Abstract.
'Within twentieth-century Australian fiction, suburbia has long been trivialised, satirised, or ignored as a site incompatible with a narrative of transformation, a location from which to flee. However, little critical attention has been directed on contemporary realist tales of the female protagonist located within the confines of suburbia—an increasingly contested yet arguably still feminine/feminised zone. This chapter examines contemporary representations and narrative trajectories of the suburban female protagonist in twenty-first-century fiction. Drawing on “postfeminist” literary theory and emerging reappraisals of the “everyday” and “home”, the chapter presents evidence of intra-suburban narratives of feminine transformation, which contradict second-wave feminist flight trajectories, thereby reclaiming and elevating fictional suburbia as a critical space in which Australian women writers may locate their stories.'
Source: Abstract.
'In 1830, English woman Georgiana Molloy arrived on the shores of Augusta in south-west Western Australia with her husband. Molloy’s long letters to her family capture their efforts to establish themselves. While much has been written on Molloy’s pioneering spirit, attention to her literary ability has been scarce. This chapter, through its analysis of Molloy’s vivid letters to her family and her lush and alluring correspondence with James Mangles, articulates how she used writing to craft a particular persona, advance her knowledge of botany and alleviate her isolation. In doing so, it will illuminate Molloy’s growing confidence as a botanist, and the particularly feminine inflection of her responses to the Australian environment.'
Source: Abstract.
'The imaginative scope of Australian lesbian writing is literally boundless. It takes in urban space as well as the outback; contemporary time to prehistory; inner voice to unlimited universe of galaxies and stars. Through close reading of the novels by Susan Hawthorne, Finola Moorehead, Dorothy Porter and others, the essay opens up new vistas of reading and critiquing lesbian writing. Myth, mathematics, physics, travel to inner and outer places is at the heart of Australian lesbian writing—whether fiction or poetry (or for that matter self-reflective prose about literature and writing). The chapter aims to assert that creating a lesbian world against the stereotypes of the mainstream view of lesbians is in itself an integral part of that experimentation.'
Source: Abstract.
'This chapter proposes that in the literary sphere the drug trope reframes spatial and temporal regulatory notions of the body. The drug metaphor disrupts temporal linearity through the reconfiguration of “junk time”. Likewise, landscapes, cityscapes and a sense of place are re-imagined in fluid, drugged dreamscapes. In this way, drug imagery evokes leakages and slippages across time, space and the body enabling a re-evaluation of corporeal possibilities and potential. The “perverse” portrayal of the subject-body in drug literature is hyperbolised through the drug trope. The extremities of drug use also magnify the examination of difference between bodies based on gender and corresponding (dis)connections with space and time. A textual analysis of the Australian novel, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) in this chapter provides a literary example.'
Source: Abstract.
'This chapter explores Barbara Hanrahan’s notion that sexuality “can manifest itself in all sorts of ways” disrupts the naturalised binary logic that governs cultural intelligibility about what constitutes “real” sex and what remains unimaginable and unspeakable. It also highlights a preoccupation in her writing with non-normative sexual desires and identities that is akin to the critical concerns of queer epistemologies. The chapter takes Hanrahan’s contestation of normative thinking about sexuality as a starting point to critically examine the queerness of her “fantastic novels”. By reading Hanrahan’s fiction queerly we are offered a valuable critique that challenges the normalising power of heterosexuality and its claims to be the only intelligible and “natural” way to organise desire.'
Source: Abstract.
'In this chapter, Brewster revisits the category of Australian Aboriginal protest poetry to see how its imperatives have changed since the 1980s. The chapter starts with the caveat that not all Aboriginal poetry is protest poetry. However, while Aboriginal poetry has always been written in a wide variety of styles and modes, protest continues to be a prominent constitutive feature of that field. Brewster aims not to privilege protest poetry as the most “authentic”, salient, or even the dominant aesthetic in the field of contemporary Aboriginal poetry but to demarcate it as a discrete body of work, identifying its politico-aesthetics and the cultural work it undertakes.'
Source: Abstract.
'A Goenpul woman from Minjerribah (Stadbroke Island), Romaine Moreton’s powerful poetry defines Aboriginality in terms of race, class, gender and sexuality. This chapter focuses on the concept of “indigenous sovereignty” with a collateral drive towards identifying the tropes of “blackness” that Moreton deployed in her poems. The chapter looks at the issue of “racism” in Moreton’s poetry by keeping in mind the theoretical engagements of “whiteness studies” that tend to problematise the black/white relation. In other words, the critical reception of Moreton’s poetry can be subjected to a relative assessment of the significance of white and indigenous readership negotiated through a complex web of indigenous or quasi-indigenous productions.'
Source: Abstract.
'Autobiographies by Aboriginal Women writers have gradually emerged for almost three decades now. Varied and interesting experiments are visible in the life-writing form by Aboriginal writers. In an attempt to write accounts of their own life and experiences, Aboriginal writers have employed different narrative techniques and methods. This chapter is a case study of life narratives by two contemporary Aboriginal women writers Jackie Huggins (Auntie Rita) and Jeanine Leane (Purple Threads.) The focus is on the different methods of writing while “recalling the past”. Interestingly, these narratives create “matriarchal spaces” of expression being written by women who are recalling either their mother’s experiences or Aunties’ stories. The chapter makes an attempt to relocate this idea of history from a feminist perspective.'
Source: Abstract.
'The chapter focuses on the Anglo-Indian-Australian author, Patricia Pengilley (1926–2010) and her autobiographical novel The Tiger and the Kangaroo Went to Sea: On Becoming an Australian (1999). The author focuses on the conflicting and evolving experiences of Pengilley as a diasporic Anglo-Indian-Australian. The chapter examines the intensities and intimacies of the contact zones, where Pengilley struggles with her Eurasian, colonial, English, Indian and Australian selves in order to claim a space of her own in her adopted country. As Pengilley encounters the process of diasporic cultural translation on her way to becoming an Australian, the author argues that the essence of diasporic identity and belonging are not characterized by homogeneity or separateness, but can be articulated in terms of multiple possibilities and positionalities.'
Source: Abstract.
'M. L. Skinner (1876–1955), the almost anonymous Australian nurse and midwife who was serving at the Hindu Rao hospital in New Delhi when the First World War broke out, had her only brush with fame as writer in Antipodean literary circles when she accomplished a collaboration with D. H. Lawrence in the novel The Boy in the Bush (1924). In this chapter, Sengupta explores Skinner’s alternative models of Australianness moored in intersections, cross-fertilizations, travel and translations, as explored in her novels Tucker Sees India (1937) and W. X. Corporal Smith (1941). Exile from successive homes and anchors had shaped Skinner’s margins and texts. She transforms exile into a transformative exi(s)tential category that engages with plural possibilities of Australianness and exposes black holes in imagining the nation in Australian Literature.'
Source: Abstract.
'Sri Lankan-Australian women writers have left their stamp on Australian fiction, from the ground-breaking first novel, A Change of Skies by Yasmine Gooneratne, in 1992, to the narratives of 2014 Miles Franklin Award recipient Michelle de Kretser. Among these novels that address the migrant’s cultural dilemma and accommodation, the novels by Chandani Lokugé demand attention. Lokugé has published three novels. This chapter examines the aspects of water and music flowing through Lokugé’s fiction to transformative new horizons and how these validate the concept of the transnation. Diversity of voices in literature is important in the contemporary public sphere in Australia and the chapter contributes towards addressing an elision in Australian discourse.'
Source: Abstract.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Australian literature was generally limited to the nationalist poetry and stories of writers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, and approved by the nationalist project of The Bulletin magazine. This is important not only for the way it underpins our understanding of Australian cultural discourses in general, but for the ways in which these inform literary value. Decades ago, Susan Sheridan argued that these cultural discourses depend on other (often gendered) binary oppositions, such as ‘outside (the bush or the city) vs inside (the domestic, the home)’, ‘Australian nationalist vs British colonial vigour’, and ‘action vs emotion’.1 What this means is that writers like Ada Cambridge and Rosa Praed ‘were denigrated as “Anglo-Australian,” “lady-novelists” whose cosmopolitan romances were considered derivative, commercial, frivolous and irrelevant to the new national literary tradition’.2 This dominant mode of thinking still influences the patterns of literary theory and criticism in the study of Australian literature today, so that these preoccupations with identity in Australian culture are necessarily coming full circle. While it is true that the 1970s and 1980s saw dominant attention being paid to feminist revisionism, uncovering ‘lost’ women and reinstating them into a literary canon, if Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing is any indication, this project seems to have emerged again as one of eminent importance.' (Introduction)
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Australian literature was generally limited to the nationalist poetry and stories of writers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, and approved by the nationalist project of The Bulletin magazine. This is important not only for the way it underpins our understanding of Australian cultural discourses in general, but for the ways in which these inform literary value. Decades ago, Susan Sheridan argued that these cultural discourses depend on other (often gendered) binary oppositions, such as ‘outside (the bush or the city) vs inside (the domestic, the home)’, ‘Australian nationalist vs British colonial vigour’, and ‘action vs emotion’.1 What this means is that writers like Ada Cambridge and Rosa Praed ‘were denigrated as “Anglo-Australian,” “lady-novelists” whose cosmopolitan romances were considered derivative, commercial, frivolous and irrelevant to the new national literary tradition’.2 This dominant mode of thinking still influences the patterns of literary theory and criticism in the study of Australian literature today, so that these preoccupations with identity in Australian culture are necessarily coming full circle. While it is true that the 1970s and 1980s saw dominant attention being paid to feminist revisionism, uncovering ‘lost’ women and reinstating them into a literary canon, if Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing is any indication, this project seems to have emerged again as one of eminent importance.' (Introduction)
