'Fictional works are a medium to not only understand the past but to give voice to the marginalised and lost. For over a century and a half sugar cane was harvested by hand in Australia, first by Melanesian indentured labourers, Asian labourers and then by free, mostly white labour. With the post-World War II economic boom, the sugar industry expanded. Thousands of men signed-on to cut cane, despite its brutality and itinerant lifestyle. For an intense seven months they lived together in barracks and worked in gangs, eyes fixed on the pay packet, cut-out day and the retention money. The powerful sense of mateship that bound the gang often faltered under the heat of a tropical sun, as the cutters battled tangled cane, avaricious farmers, and the intransigent mills’ field arbiters, the cane inspectors. Welsh immigrant author, playwright, and cane cutter John Naish’s sugar country novel, The Cruel Field, authentically exposed the dynamics and workings of the butty gang system in the Australian cane fields in the 1950s and 1960s. In this article, Naish’s novel is used to examine the butty gang in the cane fields, suggesting the potential cogency of seeing labour history through the lens of a fictional work.'
Source: Abstract.
'In Australian ecocriticism, farming is understood as a destructive colonial extraction of wealth that has obliterated the pre-colonial Aboriginal relationship with nonhuman nature. This view is problematic for those seeking to recognise positive changes in farming practices or to develop alternative literary conceptions of farming. This chapter recognises the transmission of Roman culture to Australia by juxtaposing Virgil’s Georgics with three Australian novels and exploring how the georgic mode is registered. A focus on farming practices in Ronald McKie’s The Crushing (1977), Jean Devanny’s Cindie: A Chronicle of the Canefields (1946), and John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962) enables an ecocritical reading that counters findings by Shirley McDonald (2015) of British colonists in Canada as practising sustainable agriculture. How Aboriginal characters interact with farming and are excluded from or included in the georgic mode is also discussed. Together these novels depict Aboriginal dispossession and marginalisation, large-scale transformation of pre-existing landscapes, and destruction of coral reefs. This chapter makes use of readings of Virgil’s Georgics as a reflection of Roman imperialism, a scientific text, and a portrayal of chaos and human limits to contribute new understandings of the Australian sugarcane novel and to, perhaps, enable the creation of new versions.'
Source: Abstract.
'The ‘gentlemen of the flashing blade’ laboured in an occupation that no longer exists in Australia: canecutting. It was a hard job done by hard men, and its iconic figure – the canecutter – survives as a Queensland legend, so extensively romanticized in the popular culture of the time as to constitute a subgenre characterized by subject matter and motifs particular to the pre-mechanization sugar country culture. Yet, it may seem like the only canecutters immortalized in the arts are Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s Roo and Barney. To show the breadth and diversity of this subgenre, and the legend of the canecutter and sugar country culture, this article reviews a selection of novels, memoirs, plays, short stories, cartoons, verse, song, film, television, radio and children’s books. These works address the racial, cultural and industrial politics of the sugar industry and its influence on the economic and social development of Queensland. The parts played by the nineteenth-century communities of indentured South Sea Islanders and the European immigrants who followed are represented along with those of the itinerant Anglos. These works depict, and celebrate, a colourful, often brutal, part of Queensland’s past and an Australian icon comparable with the swaggie or the shearer.' (Publication abstract)
'Many critics consider the pastoral ideal as key to understanding Australia’s rural development and therefore interpret regional literature as either supporting or working against that ideal. However, this approach is problematic for a farm novel centred on labour and a harsh reality. This essay introduces the georgic mode as a new interpretative framework. In a reading of John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962), I identify georgic conventions of the harvest, seasons, labour, harsh conditions, heroism, and farming instructions. These conventions convey insights into the wet tropics bioregion of the mid-twentieth century. Regional insights arise from depictions of sugarcane, seasons, rainforest, Indigenous people, and women. I argue that sugarcane farming and Indigenous fishing align with the georgic mode. My inclusion of Indigenous fishing extends concepts of the georgic and subverts a pastoral tradition. Spatial boundaries situate the farm and sea as georgic, and rainforest as pastoral. This delineation recognises human management of country beyond the farm. This essay has repercussions for how ‘the pastoral’ is understood and positions the georgic mode as integral to interpretations of the farm novel. Along the way, I correct a lack of critical attention to the Welsh-migrant writer, John Naish, and build on Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins’ research on North Queensland literature to revive and reshape understandings of ‘the North’.' (Publication abstract)
'Many critics consider the pastoral ideal as key to understanding Australia’s rural development and therefore interpret regional literature as either supporting or working against that ideal. However, this approach is problematic for a farm novel centred on labour and a harsh reality. This essay introduces the georgic mode as a new interpretative framework. In a reading of John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962), I identify georgic conventions of the harvest, seasons, labour, harsh conditions, heroism, and farming instructions. These conventions convey insights into the wet tropics bioregion of the mid-twentieth century. Regional insights arise from depictions of sugarcane, seasons, rainforest, Indigenous people, and women. I argue that sugarcane farming and Indigenous fishing align with the georgic mode. My inclusion of Indigenous fishing extends concepts of the georgic and subverts a pastoral tradition. Spatial boundaries situate the farm and sea as georgic, and rainforest as pastoral. This delineation recognises human management of country beyond the farm. This essay has repercussions for how ‘the pastoral’ is understood and positions the georgic mode as integral to interpretations of the farm novel. Along the way, I correct a lack of critical attention to the Welsh-migrant writer, John Naish, and build on Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins’ research on North Queensland literature to revive and reshape understandings of ‘the North’.' (Publication abstract)
'The ‘gentlemen of the flashing blade’ laboured in an occupation that no longer exists in Australia: canecutting. It was a hard job done by hard men, and its iconic figure – the canecutter – survives as a Queensland legend, so extensively romanticized in the popular culture of the time as to constitute a subgenre characterized by subject matter and motifs particular to the pre-mechanization sugar country culture. Yet, it may seem like the only canecutters immortalized in the arts are Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s Roo and Barney. To show the breadth and diversity of this subgenre, and the legend of the canecutter and sugar country culture, this article reviews a selection of novels, memoirs, plays, short stories, cartoons, verse, song, film, television, radio and children’s books. These works address the racial, cultural and industrial politics of the sugar industry and its influence on the economic and social development of Queensland. The parts played by the nineteenth-century communities of indentured South Sea Islanders and the European immigrants who followed are represented along with those of the itinerant Anglos. These works depict, and celebrate, a colourful, often brutal, part of Queensland’s past and an Australian icon comparable with the swaggie or the shearer.' (Publication abstract)
'Fictional works are a medium to not only understand the past but to give voice to the marginalised and lost. For over a century and a half sugar cane was harvested by hand in Australia, first by Melanesian indentured labourers, Asian labourers and then by free, mostly white labour. With the post-World War II economic boom, the sugar industry expanded. Thousands of men signed-on to cut cane, despite its brutality and itinerant lifestyle. For an intense seven months they lived together in barracks and worked in gangs, eyes fixed on the pay packet, cut-out day and the retention money. The powerful sense of mateship that bound the gang often faltered under the heat of a tropical sun, as the cutters battled tangled cane, avaricious farmers, and the intransigent mills’ field arbiters, the cane inspectors. Welsh immigrant author, playwright, and cane cutter John Naish’s sugar country novel, The Cruel Field, authentically exposed the dynamics and workings of the butty gang system in the Australian cane fields in the 1950s and 1960s. In this article, Naish’s novel is used to examine the butty gang in the cane fields, suggesting the potential cogency of seeing labour history through the lens of a fictional work.'
Source: Abstract.
'In Australian ecocriticism, farming is understood as a destructive colonial extraction of wealth that has obliterated the pre-colonial Aboriginal relationship with nonhuman nature. This view is problematic for those seeking to recognise positive changes in farming practices or to develop alternative literary conceptions of farming. This chapter recognises the transmission of Roman culture to Australia by juxtaposing Virgil’s Georgics with three Australian novels and exploring how the georgic mode is registered. A focus on farming practices in Ronald McKie’s The Crushing (1977), Jean Devanny’s Cindie: A Chronicle of the Canefields (1946), and John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962) enables an ecocritical reading that counters findings by Shirley McDonald (2015) of British colonists in Canada as practising sustainable agriculture. How Aboriginal characters interact with farming and are excluded from or included in the georgic mode is also discussed. Together these novels depict Aboriginal dispossession and marginalisation, large-scale transformation of pre-existing landscapes, and destruction of coral reefs. This chapter makes use of readings of Virgil’s Georgics as a reflection of Roman imperialism, a scientific text, and a portrayal of chaos and human limits to contribute new understandings of the Australian sugarcane novel and to, perhaps, enable the creation of new versions.'
Source: Abstract.
