Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 "The Outback", "River Towns" and a New Nation
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Towns are significant in the Australian nation-building process because they mark a new attitude toward the land, and hence a new way of life. If the early convicts are visitors who have no other choice, the immigrants who build the towns in the outback are willing settlers in this new land. Instead of regarding the land as a disorienting and disappointing “hell” they happen to be thrown into, the immigrants tend to look on the bush, the pasture and the farm as a place with new hope and new opportunities. Though they still carry old aesthetic expectations and occasionally lament the strangeness and barrenness of “the outback”, they are far more ready to adapt and of course, to re-create. In this sense, towns are the beginning of really positive and constructive interactions between Australians and their land. ' (77)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon From Fixity to Fluidity : The Theme of Identity in Thomas Keneally's Fiction Xiaojin Zhou , Qindao : China Ocean University Press , 2009 Z1741824 2009 multi chapter work criticism

    'Born into an Irish Catholic family in Sydney, Thomas Keneally published his first novel, The Place at Whitton, in 1964, four years after he abandoned his study for priesthood. The success of that gothic horror set in a seminary triggered a successful writing career of over forty years, in which he produced 25 novels, while making frequent and fruitful incursions into the world of nonfiction. Today Keneally is Australia’s best-known writer and Australia’s living treasure. Although Spielberg’s Schindler’s List became a media event and a household word in the 1990s, it hardly qualified Keneally as an overnight sensation. By that time, Keneally was already a widely acclaimed writer in Britain and America, truly “international”, as the Australians would like to put it, since he had publishers on both sides of the Atlantic and had won the 1982 Booker Prize. Despite discernible changes in his earlier and later works, it’s almost impossible, even as a critical expediency, to divide Keneally’s writing career into clearly marked stages. Writing on both “Australian” and “international” themes, and constantly shifting between past and present, Keneally failed to follow the normal path of arrival, growth and maturity, much to the disappointment of some Australian critics, who eagerly delighted in anticipating the destination of his literary journey...' (Author's introduction)

    Qindao : China Ocean University Press , 2009
    pg. 77-85
Last amended 18 Sep 2015 06:47:52
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