Cirrus@Austlit

'This paper compares fictional portraits of Lady Jane Franklin in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), Sten Nadolny’s The Discovery of Slowness (1997), Adrienne Eberhard’s verse novel Jane, Lady Franklin (2004) and Jennifer Livett’s novel fragment, ‘Prologue: A Fool on the Island’.

'These fictions variously reconstruct Franklin’s vilified roles as modern female traveller and social reformer in Tasmanian colonial society. They also evoke her public lamentations over the loss of her explorer husband on the doomed North-West Passage expedition. While some of these novels privilege white male viewpoints, others foreground Franklin in her guises of political agitator, traveller, and hubristic public mourner. Some of these works also depict intercultural relationships between Franklin and Indigenous Palawa children as central to their elegiac evocations of settler mourning.

'I argue that these novels differently show how Franklin’s decades-long grief ‘performance’, traversing two hemispheres, served a personal memorial function while guaranteeing her tentative access to, and ‘safe passage’ through, the male-dominated imperial political, social and cultural discourses of her day. I argue finally that, with the exception of Livett and Nadolny, these dramatic ‘retrievals’ of the figure of Jane Franklin in relation to Indigenous subjects, serve a limited critique of the parochial, racist colonial culture of early ‘Hobarton’. A complex Jane Franklin character is often elided within these novelised landscapes of dispossession, with Franklin sometimes (mis)cast as wicked queen in the construction of racial extinction narratives. ' (Author's abstract)

'Irony is an underlying factor of magical realist fiction. Richard Flanagan’s novel Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) is imbued with a particular kind of irony that results from a gap between a contemporary reader’s lament for a lost pre-modern world, that of Indigenous Tasmanians, and the book’s eponymous nineteenth-century narrator’s rage about the disappearance of that culture, one which the British convict cannot fully comprehend. Flanagan exploits and plays with this irony by using a range of epistemological magical realist techniques and associated metafictional devices. This enables Flanagan to navigate around his position as a white settler author to indirectly portray Tasmanian pre-colonial society. The novel creates a second type of irony by attacking the European Enlightenment as being a tool for imperialist domination and the subjugation of Indigenous societies, while at the same time the text upholds the Enlightenment’s humanitarian ideals. Gould’s Book of Fish, therefore, plays a critical role in the development of magical realism in contemporary Australian fiction.' (Publication abstract)

'The first decade after Federation saw the establishment of a significant number of new Australian literary journals and magazines, some of which defined themselves against mainstream literary interests – against the Bulletin, for example. What we see here is in fact a splintering of literary activity across a number of journals that fragments (or perhaps continues to fragment) any received sense of what constitutes a national literature. This paper looks at three of Thomas C. Lothian’s Melbourne journals - the Native Companion (January - December 1907), Trident (May 1907 – April 1909) and Heart of the Rose (December 1907 – October 1908) – and also briefly discusses Alfred Dickson and Frank Wilmot’s The Microbe, and Hal Stone and the ‘Waysider’ group’s Ye Kangaroo (1902 –1905), Ye Wayside Goose (1905 – 1906) and Red Ant (1912), also mostly Melbourne-based.

'The Native Companion in particular nourished an early feminine modernist aesthetic: publishing Katharine Mansfield’s first short stories, first example, and providing space for a coterie of women writers who specialised in the ‘vignette’: a narrative form that contrasted to male-centred bush nationalisms of the ‘sketch’. Like the Trident and Heart of the Rose, this journal was caught somewhere in between the influences of fin-de-siècle decadence and newly emergent European modernism; its interest in international avant-garde literary aesthetics worked to stretch modernism into the antipodes, sometimes casting it as a kind of free-floating literary effect. Heart of the Rose presented translations of Paul Verlaine and essays on Baudelaire; but it also charted local, vernacular versions of these influences, offering up delirious visions of what a trans-national, trans-historical Australian literature might be.

'The Microbe and Hal Stone’s journals celebrated an amateur literary status that allowed them to satirise the Bulletin’s claim on Australian literary tastes. They also turned to the ‘vignette’, and played out the influences of European symbolism and nascent modernism; but they satirised the pretentions of journals like Heart of the Rose and never invested in a representative canon of writers. Together, these little magazines present an alternative literary scene that tried to re-imagine the ideals of a national literature even as they radically distinguished themselves from the mainstream.' (Publication abstract)

'Though made as a flippant and provocative remark, Papastergiardis’s statement evokes another made by Patrick White himself. Invited by the democratic Greek Government to give a speech as part of celebrations marking the fall of the military junta, White travelled to Athens in November 1983. His speech ‘Greece - My Other Country’ while never actually delivered, is a declaration of cultural affiliation and affection, in which White asks rhetorically, “How could I resist returning at this point, when the close ties of love and friendship, the events of history, and those vertiginous landscapes of yours, tell me that Greece is my other country?” White’s connection to Greece permeates his work, from short stories set in Anatolia, Athens, and the Levant, to Greek characters in many novels, to the the prevalence of Greek religious and symbolic imagery. At the same time, ‘Greekness’ was a literal and prominent concern in White’s life, embodied, of course in the presence of Manoly Lascaris, White’s partner of forty-nine years and his “central mandala” (Flaws in the Glass 100). This paper will explore the signifier of ‘Greekness’ as inscribed by White through an examination of the Greek, Byzantine and Orthodox facets of his work, with a particular focus on The Twyborn Affair. It will attend to the implications of these Greek objects, entities and moments for the representation of fictional selves, and consider the interplay of fictional and biographical elements in their construction.' (Publication abstract)

'Critics have suggested that the publication of Patrick White’s Voss (1957) and Randolph Stow’s To the Islands (1958) within a year of each other signalled both a search for truth, and a questioning of cultural norms. Critical discourse has largely centred on the main characters (Voss and Heriot) and their movement within, and relationship to, an omnipresent landscape. I propose, however, to consider the influence of European literary traditions on depictions of gender in Voss and To the Islands.

'It is my contention that in modelling their main characters on the literary figure of the Wanderer, White and Stow amplify traditional masculine ideals. This is due to the intrinsic connection between the Wanderer and melancholy, the sublime and genius. These tropes have been masculinised to such an extent that the values and beliefs they encompass quite often pass unacknowledged by the reader. Foregrounding the powerful connections binding the Wanderer and masculinity will therefore, facilitate a reading of gender in Voss and To the Islands that has until now been overlooked.' (Publication abstract)

'The Tasman Sea, precisely defined by oceanographers, remains inchoate as a cultural area. It has, as it were, drifted in and out of consciousness over the two and a half centuries of European presence here; and remains an almost unknown quantity to prehistory. Its peak contact period was probably the sixty odd years between the discovery of gold in Victoria and the outbreak of the Great War; when the West Coasts of both New Zealand’s main islands, and the South East Coast of Australia, were twin shores of a land that shared an economy, a politics, a literature and a popular culture: much of which is reflected in the pages of The Bulletin from 1880s until 1914. There was, too, a kind of hangover of the pre-war era and of the ANZAC experience into the 1920s; but after that the notional country sank again beneath the waves.

'This paper attempts recovery of fragments of that lost zone from a prospective standpoint: beginning the restoration of a Weltanschauung which, while often occluded, has never really gone away. It will be undertaken by focussing upon the story of the Melbourne born Lynch brothers and their cohort: Guy and Joe Lynch, George Finey, Cecil ‘Unk’ White and Noel Cook, all of whom migrated from Auckland to Sydney after World War One and worked in the 1920s as artists, caricaturists and cartoonists on various newspapers and magazines. Joe was sculpted twice in stone by elder brother Guy; as a soldier standing on a plinth in the war memorial at Devonport, Auckland; and, controversially, as a faun in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens. Joe Lynch fell, or jumped, from a ferry one night and drowned in Sydney harbour; and thereby became the inspiration for Kenneth Slessor’s great elegy, Five Bells.' (Publication abstract)

'Randolph Stow (1935–2010) moved to England in the 1960s, choosing to settle in his ancestral places, first in Suffolk, then in Essex. This article considers how ‘Englishness’ is evident in his choice of home, in the influences on his writings, in his interest in myth, and in his use of dialect. Continuity and renewal lie at the heart of his final two novels, The Girl Green as Elderflower and The Suburbs of Hell in Essex, this ‘circling’ a particularly English trait. Stow came to know and love his new East Anglian countryside, writing its greenness and its flowers into The Girl Green as Elderflower, its gritty coast into The Suburbs of Hell. Much has been written of Stow’s evocation of landscape in his Australian novels, and the same receptivity to place can be seen in his final two novels. The article draws heavily on biographical resonances and on Stow’s many letters home, as well as linking his work to other writers who have been captivated by the unique atmosphere of the east of England, with its flat expanses and wide skies.' (Publication abstract)

'The "story of a journey ... a picture of the country ... a record ...,": Henrietta Drake-Brockman saw herself giving fellow Australians through her contributions to Walkabout magazine during the twentieth century. Along with Drake-Brockman several other well-known Australian female authors made regular contributions to Walkabout; including Ernestine Hill, Mary Durack and Patsy Adam-Smith. They wrote about their firsthand experiences of often remote parts of Australia, describing the landscape, the people who dwelt in it and their achievements for the edification of the largely urban readership of this popular magazine. These women wrote with enthusiasm and curiosity about the country in which they had been born. Still a young nation forming and forging an identity in the face of harsh beginnings and catastrophic world events, Australia in the mid 1900s was no longer a convict or pioneer nation, but what was it? This paper discusses representations of country in the articles of two of the female contributors to Walkabout magazine: Ernestine Hill and Henrietta Drake-Brockman. These writers saw Australia as both "grim and fascinating"; a vast land of opportunity to be "possessed" and made "productive" to the economic advantage of its inhabitants. As such they provide an intriguing insight into the development of the nation, and contributed to processes of inscription during the period of Walkabout's run (1934 - 1974).' (Publication summary)

'This paper explores the representation of contemporary space in the work of Australian poet Laurie Duggan. Focusing upon Duggan’s Crab & Winkle (2009)—a work ‘situated’ in the United Kingdom—the paper contends that such a text presents an example of ‘spatial mapping’, one in which the representation of place and space is both a thematic preoccupation and a determining feature of the poem’s structural concerns. In Crab & Winkle, a book-length record of Duggan’s first year living in East Kent, the reader is offered a diaristic mapping of an environment largely unfamiliar to the poem’s (autobiographical) narrator. In this expatriate work, Australia—as physical and social space—becomes a ghostly presence, an imagined space that is nevertheless a vital component of the cognitive map the text constructs through a collage of everyday materiality and the mental spaces of memory and imagination. Situating Duggan’s work within a tradition of process-based aesthetics, the paper argues that Crab & Winkle constructs experiential, yet necessarily provisional maps of contemporary space that roam from the local to the global.' (Publication summary)

'This essay examines the representation of early twentieth-century Australia in three novels, The Mango Tree, The Crushing, and Bitter Bread, which were published in the1970s by the well-known journalist Ronald McKie. The novels make the catastrophes of World War I and the Great Depression, and the frenzies of the intervening Jazz Age palatable and engaging for a later, comparatively comfortable Australian readership. They seek further to reconcile readers with the pain of living by promoting ethics of courage, kindness and decency. The novels assume and defend a central Anglo-Celtic identity for Australians. While they reject English cultural and political control, they value the input of Continental European and Asian immigrants. Living Aboriginal people are a notable absence from all three novels, but The Mango Tree seeks to appropriate Aboriginal feeling for country for the native-born descendants of settlers. Through comic-satiric depictions of life in rural Queensland communities McKie’s fiction warns of the dangers of insularity for the nation as a whole.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay explores the possibility that Christina Stead's character, Sam Pollit of The Man Who Loved Children, though displaying many apparently masochistic behaviours and characteristics, is a counterexample to Freud's moral masochist. It employs and compares Freud's and Deleuze's theories of masochism in the context of analysing Sam Pollit's characterisation and the effects of his masochism on his female partner.' (Publication summary)