This essay examines how Carey displays the multiple fakeries of fiction in My Life as a Fake. It notes the multiple inter-textual references to the Ern Malley hoax and the gothic horror of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It examines the three unreliable narrating voices, the uneven characterisation of Christopher Chubb, and the magic realism seeking to animate Bob McCorkle and his present/absent book My Life as a Fake. It argues that the dazzling display of meta-fictional complexity, much celebrated by reviewers, contributes to the book's failure to create engaging characters and a credible narrative. [From the journal's webpage]
For many Aboriginal people the missionary experience has been a defining one. Therefore Christian missions comprise an important aspect of the debate about the history of contact between Aborigines and colonisers. The revisionist contact histories that emerged in the latter decades of the twentieth century generally failed to look closely at missionary/Aboriginal encounters and promulgated the stereotypical and often simplistic assessment of missions and missionaries as the arch dispossessors of Aboriginal cultures. This case study of the Presbyterian Mission at Ernabella in the far north-west of South Australia reveals the specific and unique features that are glossed over by such generalisations. There is evidence at Ernabella of minimal intervention in tribal life, of dynamic, diverse and creative responses on the part of Aboriginal people and missionaries in preserving the vitality of religious life through periods of rapid change. Starting from the premise that Christianity was regarded as important by Aboriginal people rather than a foreign imposition, a more nuanced aspect of contact history is revealed that goes beyond the assumed crude binarism in respect to Aboriginal beliefs and Christianity. It is one that fits better with the lived reality of many Aboriginal people who embrace multi-layered approaches to spiritual life and regard the mission times and their relationship with missionaries in a positive light. [From the journal's webpage]
This essay explores the notion of ambivalence in colonial modes of representation of Asian subjects in An Australian in China (1895) by G.E. Morrison (1862-1920). Morrison's attitudes and judgements about the Chinese reflect a complex set of attitudes that reflect a British Imperial stance inflected by pre-Federation bias toward Western values and toward a dominant Australian tendency to use Western standards of democracy and egalitarianism to judge the shortcomings of its Asian neighbours, as argued by D'Cruz and Steele (2003 33-4). Morrison's ambivalence has an origin in the fear that the Chinese would perhaps become more successful economic colonisers than white people. But if Morrison was ambivalent about Asians, caught between admiration for, and an anxiety about the Chinese especially, was he one of those Australians cited as those unable to "engage with constructive and continuous relations with Asia" (D'Cruz and Steel 34)? I argue that Morrison is not simply a eugenicist or anti-Asian racist, but re-iterates a British imperialist grand narrative on best-practice colonial governance and an example of how knowledge of the orient may be acquired so as to serve Imperial interests. Within this narrative all races have strengths and weaknesses, and this "melange" must be managed by enlightened white British administrators in order to ensure cultural harmony throughout the empire, and especially where British geo-political interests are at stake. This multiculturalism is segregationist but may also allow room for hybrid or cross-cultural cultures to take root through intermarriage of chosen white elites and selected subalterns (much as plant breeders select seed stock). While Morrison may praise far-flung edges of empire and those regions that the British engages with for reasons of trade, he argues that predominantly white colonies like those in Australia should remain white. Like a benign object suddenly appearing as the anamorphic skull in a Holbein portrait (Reading 26), viewed from a certain angle, what seems like Morrison's affection for China can just as easily appear as a form of aversion and suspicion. [From the journal's webpage]
This article reexamines the construction of Aboriginal Australia in Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines. It explores the ways in which this postmodernist travelogue transforms certain patterns of the literary representation of the Central Australian desert, re-inventing and re-contextualizing the 19th century topos of the unmappable land. The analysis of the figurative language of the novel focuses on its master tropes, the map and the labyrinth, suggesting that they both reflect the traveller's inclination to appropriate the Aboriginal worldview and at the same time symbolize the landscape's (and its inhabitants') resistance to being appropriated. [From the journal's webpage]
This article deals with Casella's re-reading of the representation of Sicily as a bucolic land. In his novel The Sensualist, he interprets the pastoral and picturesque representation of the Island as a form of escapism from the sterile and dead centre of the outback on which feelings of weird melancholy are projected. Deeply melancholic, its characters have a double feeling of hate towards a colonial past that continues to haunt them due to the lost innocence of the Australian colonial dream which turned into a discourse of violence, and love due to the hope of recreating that lost innocence and optimism and wash away the polluting memories of the past. However, there is no possibility of recreating such an innocence and for the melancholic subject the only way out is to search for it in a land which is spatially and temporally distant. By drawing on Freud and Kristeva, it will also be suggested that Casella seems to suggest that the white subjects of the novel, but also Australia's society, will always be haunted by their loss of innocence unless they rethink their white identity as fragmented and acknowledge the polluting memories of the past. And as a consequence, they will always need a place like Sicily as a fetish that recreates their fantasy of superiority. [From the journal's webpage]
It is rare to come across studies of important themes in the context of a national culture, such as the Australian, and think, why has this not been examined properly before? Fiona Probyn-Rapsey's Made to Matter. White Fathers, Stolen Generations represents such a study. While stolen generations have been the subject of many studies in the wake of the Bringing Them Home Report released in the mid-nineties, the stolen generations' white fathers have not attracted such scholarly attention. There are many reasons for this neglect, which could presumably include: the spotlight was on the direct victims of this atrocious and cultural-genocidal policy culminating of course in Kevin Rudd's 2008 apology; as Probyn-Rapsey points out some white fathers would disown their "half-caste" offspring, others would own up to them at the risk of attracting attention from the white authorities, whose vigorous pursuit of white justice is mercilessly laid bare in the dramatized autobiography, Rabbit Proof Fence, and Baz Luhrmann's fictional account Australia. [From the journal's webpage]
Peter Carey is the master of dramatic, intriguing and far-fetched opening sentences, starting with his first novel Bliss ("Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him"), through to his first short-listed Booker Prize novel Illywhacker ("My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity."), and to the second Booker Prize winning True History of the Kelly Gang ("I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false."), to name but a few. In his thirteenth novel, Carey treats his readers to another arresting beginning in the style of Jarmusch's 1991 Night on Earth: "It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22.00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed" (3). [From the journal's webpage]
