Cirrus@Austlit

'The Great Australian Loneliness (1937) is a famous book of travel reportage by Ernestine Hill (1899–1972), a key figure in the mid-twentieth century shaping of popular media culture in Australia. Through her journalism she disseminated debate about the great public issues of her day: the status of Aboriginal peoples, immigration from Asia and the state’s role in national development. In this paper, I take the White Australian ‘loneliness’ her title invokes as a methodological challenge to situate both her life and the ethnically diverse sociability she actually described in an inter-Asian framework of analysis capable of unsettling those bonds between ethnicity and nationality that many twentieth-century writers worked so hard to secure. In the process, I argue for an ‘Australian Asian’ approach to cultural history.' (Publication abstract)